


Reborn! Online

by RZWrites



Series: Paravento Famiglia [1]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: OC, OCs - Freeform, Online!, Original Character(s), Paravento Famiglia, Reborn! Online
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 11:47:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 48,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24849247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RZWrites/pseuds/RZWrites
Summary: Due to the popularity of the series called Katekyo Hitman Reborn, the game industry decided to create an online MMO that allows the player to join the world with their own individual virtual body. While the game is updating, something glitches in it causing certain players to unlock abilities that were supposedly deleted during the shift from Alpha version to Beta. How does this glitch happen and what else does it cause? Well... Let's just say that the NPCs aren't just pixels and simple game AI anymore....
Series: Paravento Famiglia [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1797679
Kudos: 10





	1. Connect

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to my humble little story.  
> Technically speaking, this is KHR's main story line from a different perspective, in a different setting entirely.  
> This is also the reason why canon characters rarely make appearances in this specific story.
> 
> Grammatical errors are highly likely, but who doesn't do mistakes every once in a while?  
> Originally posted on Wattpad.
> 
> -R

_Naoki has come online._

Simple notification made several people turn their heads towards the door to the office of the guild master.  
Feet shuffled nervously, awaiting with impatience for the doors to open and allow them to walk in, to meet the boss.

Six other notifications pop up on the screen making them inhale sharply. The officers were present too.  
This wouldn't be pretty.

Inside the office, Naoki pinched the bridge of his nose, not completely over the transition to the game world yet.

He had started the game as a beta tester just like his officers, a beta tester of Reborn! Online. And if you asked from him, it was a good game that followed the story and spirit of the original composition well, giving the needed restrictions such as the dying will flames not appearing outward to your body as that ability was strictly tied to the Vongola and Shimon dons.

You could choose between different factions; Yakuza, Mafia, Mafiya, Gangster, Pirate and so forth. Naoki had chosen the Sicilian Mafia, he was most familiar with it. He had been very curious of it at one point of his life and had put this knowledge into good use inside the game, soon establishing his own Famiglia with six people he'd met through the game.

They were called Paravento, shield, and their base of operation was in Syracuse, located on the coast of the island. There had been another Famiglia before, but the young Paravento Group had wiped them out very effectively, leaving behind the ruins of the said Famiglia and several bodies that were buried in the silence while the Paravento took its first steps to the high ranks.

The game was operated via a tube like vessel that kept one's body safe from any harm and a helmet that transferred your consciousness inside the game.

Naoki hated to admit it, but he was pretty good at the game, especially the parts that were about handling the paper work. "All thanks to my business studies", he thought often sourly, as he kept looking through the files.

Paravento had become pretty famous inside the game and many tried to get in, but Naoki was very picky with his surbonidates. The officers screened each file that had been sent to them, why was this made to be so realistic dammit, and picked out hundred best of them. Those players were then divided into groups that were tested by each of them and the total of the applicants narrowed into thirty-five.

Thirty-five that were now waiting for the final judgement nervously.

Naoki's eyes scanned the reports of the lot, dividing them into three piles, accepted, failed and unsure.

Those who were put to the unsure list were given extra training and the NPCs would later on report their status and if they could be trusted.

The NPCs were the extra workers that they'd created overtime for the base and it had started from something very small and humble. A house keeper.

She was an elderly woman with an iron grip over the rest of the NPCs, her name was Natalia Stanislav. Soon the grey lady with blue eyes had been accompanied by an army of butlers and maids, each of them battle ready and more than capable of keeping the HQ in both good shape and well protected.

After the maids became the hitmen and assassins of the Famiglia and after these two factions arrived the healers and hackers.

While creating your own NPCs was fun and all, Naoki preferred to hire actual NPCs from the streets too and thus they'd gotten their hands on a man, they never thought to be on their side.

Nezutora.

The incompetent teacher of Namimori Middle School.

And while Naoki had originally loathed the very idea of the insolent man being within their group, he'd soon seen the opportunities. Nezutora served as their eyes and ears within Namimori and while he still was a slimy bastard with the close to zero redeeming abilities, he made a good informant. He sent his reports often and they all were fine in detail, though Naoki was a bit suspicious of him sending copies of his students' exams to him, and his high working moral made him a valuable asset to the organisation.

Many gamers would've wished to change the story of Sawada Tsunayoshi for the better, but Naoki knew for a fact that game didn't allow it to happen. He'd tried over and over again to do it during the beta, and always failed, the game was programmed to make the original story to flow and happen on the background as you played. It also had made creating your own flame impossible. Flame combination, yes, completely new flame, no. Many of the gamers had dropped playing when they realised it, even more upon finding out that dying will flames were given to the players by random.

The game threw a dice over the flame type, purity, and if the person would even be given flames. For the most parts they weren't inorder to stay true to the lore of the original composition. High purity levels of flames were rarer than multiflame user, as evident by the fact that so far only Vongola and Shimon seemed to have completely pure flame users in their rows if Arcobaleno weren't accounted for.

Earning nicknames was actually easier than getting yourself a flame user character who was active on top of that.

For an example, Naoki had earned a nickname Primo from his six officers and the name Justice from the NPCs due to the way he chose to play the game. He himself had primary flame type of a sky, secondary cloud and a dormant rain, his specific flame cocktail carried the specs of 60, 30 and 10 and was most commonly referred to as the Flame of Justice sue to his nickname and moral compass that he chose to follow despite of the game being about crime organisations.

The role play section of the game was very heavily supported and everything you did in the game affected the happenings in real time, Reborn! Online was almost its own reality in that way.

Naoki closed his eyes, thinking back to the day he first created his characters.

Unlike many believed, he had two characters with nearly identical appearances. His original character Ren, short for Renato, who was a red haired male with gravity defying hair and yellow eyes, thin almost fragile looking build and low purity sun flames. The company had been testing the flame system at the time and handed out the flames more generously to the testers, creating ultimately a BETA server that was simply referred to as Flame server. Naoki had taken most of it by developing a gaming style that allowed him to be more flexible with the flames and do more damage despite of his character having so weak flames that he was thought to be nearly useless. Sadly, he couldn't log onto the server Ren was in unless there was to be a patch that needed testing in case of bugs and errors.

His current character, one could even argue and call it his main, was called Naoki Oda, and just like his beta character, Naoki's hair defied gravity, but was black in colour, his eyes being on the amber side, but he often chose to allow his flames make the eyes look more orange, it was a neat trick he'd learned and made sure that if he needed to go undercover, all he needed to do was to allow his eyes to resume to the amber. The character was on the semi short side for a European, standing only 175 cm tall, which was ideal height for an asian man who was slightly taller than the average. It also made transferring into the game easier to adjust to. He was pale, but that was only because he was often stuck inside his office.

.......and he also forgot to change the skin tone during the character creation mode.

Character creation... It had taken a long time to finish. The amount of things you could change was insane, you could affect _everything_ in your character. The back story had been harder to come up with, but after a long time of thinking, he'd decided to start off as a civilian.

Civilian, who'd been first taken into the Famiglia, that'd been destroyed later on, because of having flames and for looking too much into mafia. The role play was serious business in this game. So serious that one could never know when the game was at pause. Naoki had never asked about the backstories of his officers, hadn't seen it to be too important, they would bring the story forward with their actions.

Naoki put the files aside and called his officers in. Six people appeared and smiled to him, knowing their roles in the Famiglia more than well. They could talk later, they had work to do now.

And in the medium sized office filled with old looking furniture, the leader of the Paravento made his call, choosing only three people. He was a strict man and didn't appreciate any moles in his Famiglia. Those who had been sent out to infultrate the Paravento, returned with empty hands, wondering how the Don had been able to weed them out. It really didn't take a genius though, all that was needed was even one maid, who'd seen you act suspiciously during your stay at the HQ and decided to report it to her higher ups.

Naoki leaned back in his chair and sighed, if only creating connections was this easy in real life....

Why did most of the people he met have the Dumb anyways? It was so much easier to just... _Listen t_ o the world and people around you and make decisions based on the data. It'd save a lot of time and lives if people stopped to think, but then again... It wasn't like he really wanted to be associated with people who couldn't think clearly or were too struck by their emotions to realise that the world didn't roll around them. He sighed again, this time in a tired manner that told the housekeeper near him that he was not happy and had nearly given up on humanity once again.

Natalia laid the tray down in front of him, her eyes flickering with the unsaid question. Naoki looked at her, his tired eyes staring into the AI that was more alive than most of the people he'd met. His quiet voice was filled with tears he never shed and self disgust he'd grown to have as he voiced his discomfort, giving it a shape in which it existed, the ugly truth that would set him apart from humans and keep him isolated from the masses he couldn't comprehend and that couldn't understand him in return.

"I am a genius."

It wasn't something to brag about, it wasn't something he was proud of, it was the pain he lamented, the reason to his losses and the inherited inconvenience he could never get rid of. He was a genius and he hated it.

The only people who he could connect with and felt like could understand him were his officers, who all carried their own inconveniences and talents, many that they lamented as he did. And he'd never even met these people outside of this simulation that had become the lives in which they truly lived in.

Others could laugh at him all they want and claim that Naoki was his mask, but the tired man knew better. Naoki was who he was, his other life was the mask. Unconsciously, he allowed his hand to gloss over his chest, to the point where lied a scar not many knew of even existing. That same scar existed in both universes, the "real" and the "game", but their sources were different. In real life, he'd fallen over and hit himself onto a sharp edge that'd scratched his flesh, in game he was stabbed onto the same place.

Naoki looked at Natalia, who smiled at him softly like the surrogate mother she was to many. Her eyes seeing more and understanding more. "Natalia... I might have to visit the other side for a longer time period than usual. I have a meeting there and I can't postpone it", he said sadly to the woman, who nodded. "I'll make sure that the others will be notified of your absence Primo. Be careful in the other world"

How had he managed to create this NPC who was so much more, he didn't know.

Deep within the code of the game, something turned static and send an impulse throughout the world....


	2. Dullness

Naoki opened his eyes, the oddly mixed orbs of green and brown blinking couple times inside the pod his body was resting in. He slowly took in his surroundings, ultimately sighing as it was indeed the basement level of his home, only place that was big enough to have the full gaming gear inside of it and had the necessary plumbing mechanism to make a full blown secret hideout where not a soul would be capable of finding him if he didn't wish so.

And Naoki rarely wanted to be found.

One could argue and claim that he was prideful man who thought too highly of himself, but it was quite the opposite. Naoki hated himself to the maximum. Hated himself because he was always hurt, because he couldn't be understood by those who were around him, because he saw things differently, because he was a realist, because he saw how the system didn't work, because he knew that the humanity was build upon piles of corpses that the New generations were forced to climb over, because he thought it was unfair, because he was a genius.

All of his self hatred and bad feelings came from that one source called a brain. He'd be lying if he claimed to have never thought about ending his own life just to make the pain stop, but he'd then have to also deny the fact that he was living just because he wanted to fix things. He had no superpowers nor physical strength, so he couldn't be the kind of hero that saved people by fighting like Captain America and Spiderman did, he lacked funds and skill to become a pilot of a super advanced high tech suit like Iron Man. Only thing he had was his wits and closed off personally, his body being his prison and limitation among with the limitations that were bestowed upon his persona by the society. And he hated every second of his life as a useless person, incapable of becoming a needed part of the machine of the humanity, fated to look at its work by the eyes of an outsider. He'd never be the part, he'd known that as long as his memory went.

Each movement he made was as if in jelly or very thick soup, his mind yearning to return to the world he had a place in, had a worth, had friends. Pained to be fractured apart of the world he wanted to be in. But it was no use, he had to go upstairs, he had to work on the team project, he had to live instead of _living._ And with each passing moment he felt more and more out of place. It hurt to be there, it felt more like a trap and less like a life worth living. His eyes took in the room and soon closed as the painful reminder of what he wasn't, what he lacked, grew too much to bear.

The moldy grey stone walls that were never made to look nice, accompanied by the darker grey cement floor. It was cold and bare, lifeless, soulless, dull. The only colours in the room came from the wires that travelled around the room, creating unfinished and, dare I even say, depressed look into the space. There was a small kitchen area Nao had built it himself from scratch and spare parts. Learned how from the books, the Internet and the always present lifestyle shows. The secret floor was still unfinished, but it already had enough for one to bunker themself in for decades and live somewhat comfortably. If you weren't into socialising that was. There was a tiny bathroom with working plumbing system, it's own bathtub with a shower option, there was a bedroom like section where he could rest, though he preferred to sleep in the pod while logged into the game, it was more peaceful, more comfortable, more real. Then there was the kitchen and... The game.

Naoki forced himself to walk into the staircase he'd hidden behind a bookshelf, it was very convenient bookshelf to be honest, it was just the right size and easy to move along with the door to which it was attached to. And as he always had the key, and the only one who knew _where_ the keyhole was there wasn't any danger of someone finding his safe haven in his absence. Like this longer absence during which he was forced to host some stupid study circle to his "team" that probably would try to dig through his personal stuff and drink until they couldn't stand and leave his home at 3am. Ugh. People.

The male finally arrived into his "living room" with the neat opening of a staircase, maybe he should put money aside to build an elevator under the stair case? It'd make things so much faster and it could be hidden with ease too. He glanced at himself from the mirror and decided to paint a regular human face onto himself this time. Naoki admitted that he was pretty okay looking person, but he didn't like the fact that he had a baby face despite of being in his 20s, hence he'd learned how to do make up in order to make himself look older than 13 year old brat. His words, not mine.

He looked around in the setting he'd created, the illusion that was of a normal living room. It had just enough detail to give it personality and signal that it was his living room, but it still wasn't anything more than a set piece to him. His whole house was like that, a set one could easily use to film a whole movie in and fool the audience to think that it was legit.

The "House" gave off the impression of a firm man, a traditionalist, who lived by certain rules and a strict schedule, though it couldn't be further away from the truth. Naoki never followed schedules, his sleeping pattern was a mess, he'd wake up at three am to draw, go back to sleep at six, wake up at two and play until midnight. He himself was a mess, but he didn't mind it. It wasn't really that harmful for him.

He wasn't that traditional either and was quite eccentric, a quirk that his officers had soon found out and embraced with triumph. He would've fit straight into the Addams family had they existed in real life same way as on the screen if we're being honest here.

Naoki chose his clothes of the day, a button up shirt, white, dark trousers and a grey vest, and deemed himself to be presentable. He absentmindedly wondered if any of those around him had yet caught onto his act and realised that he wasn't quite what he let on. But then again, he'd lived over twenty years crafting his mask, it'd be hard to see through something that has been practised and fined for decades in order to make sure that he wouldn't be bothered much.

He looked into the mirror, his long red hair now tied up onto a low ponytail and the makeup shaping his facial features into sharper ones. He allowed the spark he'd usually have to dull away, this was where Naoki ended and Natael started. The mask was placed, set was ready and the script was clear, it was always clear, humans were so easy to predict that it made him almost laugh.

He glanced over the list he'd received earlier and typed the number in, Natael ordered pizza and waited...

Natalia blinked as she looked how her boss faded from the view, knowing that he was now in the other dimension. She didn't quite know how she was able to understand what it was, just like she didn't know how she knew what it was. She'd always been like that, ever since she had been created. The housekeeper took a look at her script, or at least tried to, and once again failed to do so. She'd found herself to be more and more aware as days went by and realised that she saw her creators more as her own children than higher force that had given her shape and form. She was very much a mother to everyone who came into the household, no matter the age nor position, and she had complete faith in her children.

The woman glanced out of the window as the Red division's leader, Storm Officer under the name Maya, put her troops go through Hell and back, her fire both inspiring and scaring her underlings. Maya had all three of her flame types in use, but as a result her emotional balance had become jagged and harder to control. Though Natalia suspected that it was common with storm type as she'd never met anyone red who was not a boiling mess under everything.

As she watched, Maya's posture dropped, ah, so the young woman needed coffee and some sweets to go with it, perhaps a Danish pastry? Natalia turned away from the window, headed towards the kitchen. Her mind analysing what she saw while thinking of what to serve for the dinner, sure she wasn't the chef, but she knew the Seven and was capable of reading their moods with ease, this alone made her one of the strongest in the house.

Passing a door after door, her mind came up with the most perfect combination to serve for those who were now in the building of the Seven. The purple lady appeared to be stressed, so she'd be given Ceylon tea with a slice of lemon, sugar and milk to accompany her slice of cake. The master of yellow appeared to be worn-out after his workout session so a simple milk tea would do, the illusionist always had a herbal tea at this time of day and the green sir would be given decaf. The last one mentioned truly needed to watch his coffee usage and try to be more healthy, perhaps a nice fruit salad would also be in order for him?

The yellow Master, whose name wasn't known as he liked to change between the names often, though Primo referred to him as Sun, soon staggered out of the training room where the newest recruits with sun flames had been the whole day. Out of breath he kept looking around with a tired glint in his eyes, Natalia would make sure to mention it to the Don. The confusion could be almost tasted in the air as the Sun Officer scanned the hallway, obviously unsure of where his boss was.

"Sky?" he asked quietly, his soft pronunciation giving out him not being a native speaker, albeit he spoke without any clear accent. Natalia looked at him, today he was rocking long black hair with brown eyes it seemed, jegus he took the whole undercover thing super seriously. Natalia's eyes softened as she was certain that he and the young Don had bonded flame wise long ago. "He had something to do in the other dimension, he should be back for dinner or later", she said as she observed the male's reaction to the information.

Sun nodded slowly, clearly not happy with the answer, but decided not to push it, Naoki didn't really like to talk about his private life outside the game. However, the longer he was away, the more restless the officers were and none of them knew what was causing it. Natalia patted his shoulder telling the man to go rest before the tea time and the man complied, his brows furrowed in worry as per usual when someone he cared for wasn't present.

Natael was not a happy person at that moment. His study group was not even trying to hide the fact that they weren't interested in the work they needed to go through, didn't even bother to act as if they weren't lazy. The male sighed as he pinched the bridge of his nose, it was no good, he was exhausted and needed to rest, but he still had at least an hour or so to go.

"Amanda,could you please show me what you've done so far?" he said carefully and the blonde girl in question complied as she kept complaining about the task itself. Natael referred to all of his study partners as either boys of girls, never men and women and the reason was simple. None of them acted like the adults they were and chose to act as if they were sixteen. Which was not a good thing if you know what the mindset of a hormonal teenager is like.

He swiftly scanned through the text, his eyes narrowed as he spotted her credited sources. He then deleted a line of text before opening the site she'd originally typed and started to click through the links. "Wikipedia isn't a creditable source because it can be edited by anyone, it's also basically an essay in itself, hence if you do want to use it, it's better to check out the sources the author used instead and use them when making the source list", he finally said as he showed the computer screen to the flustered girl.

"Well I'm sorry, not all of us can be geniuses like you", she answered with slightly rude voice, which didn't go unnoticed by anyone present. Natael took a deep breath and smiled. It wasn't really a true smile, it didn't even make it to his eyes that stayed cold and emotionless. "Come on now, you're much smarter than I am! You know all kinds of stuff that I don't and you're so much better with people than I, doesn't that make you a genius on your own right?" his answer was a lie. A total lie. But he didn't want to cause more provocations, didn't want to be in middle of an argument, arguments took time and he'd rather have his "guests" gone as soon as possible. But the blonde didn't notice, she was too busy with flaunting her own ego while the rest of the group were paying attention to her antics.

Natael's smile dropped as he started to read through what he'd written so far. His essay was ready, he knew that it was perfect, and yet... He opened the version he'd made beforehand, a version that looked unfinished. He couldn't afford to look like he was ready, the rest would only try to get him to do theirs then.

Pretending to concentrate on writing, his brows furrowed, he kept reading the articles about the subject. And whenever someone asked him where he was with his essay, he'd laugh as if embarrassed and say that he's only at certain page.

The night fell and the study group left, each of them either smiling happily over "successful" group study or muttering about the whole assignment being a conspiracy created by the teachers inorder to torment their students.

Natael saw them off and made sure that they were gone before he'd return to his real home, wash his face and slide into comfort of the fake world that soon welcomed him.

Looking at the clock, he saw that it was around 6pm ingame, the dinner time. He already knew that he looked exhausted, the game avatars responded to the initial mood of the gamer after all, so when he exited his office, those who weren't aware of what he'd been really doing assumed that it was because of all the paperwork he had to go through.

Natalia was the one to inform him of the dinner being served and so he followed her, his cape flowing behind him dramatically.

As he arrived, he saw his officers and couple high ranked hitmen already being present. Naoki swiftly took his seat, greeting everyone present as he so did. True to their nature, the officers soon were asking him questions to ensure that he was alright. He only smiled at them affectionately as his answer went through their private chats. "I am now."

Satisfied with the answer, the group dug in.

And then...

It _hit_ them.


	3. Impact

It started off somewhere within the game code, a tiny malfunction that happened during the upload of the new data that'd be available after the next patch. One single thing that was not quite right. And from there, it started to move forward within the source code. From computer to computer, it went on and on, selectively going through the gamers as if it was alive.

Features were unlocked to some who were lucky, while others stayed with their own characters being unchanged by the error in the system. The NPCs started to change, their own AIs morphing into something new, something more. Natalia was one of the first although her awareness was made by accident that came to be due to the hands that shaped her were unfamiliar with more complex coding. Because of one person who was working on the team that made the system for creating worker NPCs possible included a broken part of code that only activated if certain conditions were met. But she was still the first.

And as she went on with her daily life, she also felt the error that went through the dimensions of the game like waves caused by a stone falling into a pond.

The error flowed through the in-game universe and then it hit the gamers who were online.

And inside the dining room of one group made off of the former beta testers, the impact was one of the greatest.

There was some sort of... Impulse, that went right through the officers and the Don as they sat down to dine. Thinking of it as a slight lag, each of them checked their connection which indeed did show that there had been a peak, though it was opposite of where it should've been would it have been a regular slow connection spike.

Naoki blinked as he adjusted his tie, still tired from the study group session, he felt like something had changed, but then again it could've been just the game repairing something like the textures. Speaking of the textures... The walls and the items around them looked a lot more... Real than usual.

He sophisticatedly lifted up the fork that he had accidentally dropped because of the spike, and his brows furrowed in confused realisation. He could _feel_ the steel of the fork, and from the looks of it, he wasn't the only one.

» _So it was that kind of update.._ » he concluded as he absent-mindedly placed more virtual food inside his mouth, expecting it to not taste like anything at all.

The rich flavours of the meal suddenly bloomed inside his mouth causing him to stop for a minute, this wasn't right. The game platform didn't work like this. How was this possible?

Near the doors, Natalia noticed the confused looks that the Seven sneaked to each other. She was well aware of her masters incapabilites, after all she had witnessed them struggle with holding items on their hands and picking them up, she knew that they didn't have a sense of feeling. But from their reactions, it had changed. Another thing she knew was that the only reason why the Seven even bothered to eat was because they didn't want to let the chefs down by not eating what they offered, they also had to maintain an illusion of normalcy. And now....

The look on Naoki's face told her that it had changed too. She followed carefully how the male took another careful bite, how the feeling of happiness and glee made it onto that young face.

_He could taste the food._

_And he was happy about it._

The shadows that always accompanied Naoki seemed to disappear, make room for the blinding happiness that followed each bite he took. Yet Natalia couldn't find herself to do anything but worry.   
The Seven weren't like your normal humans, she knew them, recognised that as a fact, because they all lacked certain things. They were as her code said, [Pla/yer]s and therefore there were things that weren't supposed to happen ever. And as someone who had been there for a long time, long enough to get to know each and everyone of them, she knew that this was extraordinary.

The hitmen that were present were like Natalia was, normal human's, yet they only thought that the chef had done exceptionally well or that the Seven were hungrier than usual. After all, they didn't know their superiors as well as the leader of the staff.

As the dinner came to an end, each and every one of the diners full and happy, certain ones literally beaming with happiness, the Don excused himself, clearly exhausted and tender from the day's hard work.  
Natalia watched how the Man exited the room, her worries slowly turning into a warm feeling of hope. Naoki seemed to be in a lot happier mood than he had returned with. Her traitorous mind, that knew that her wards weren't truly part of this world, secretly wishing that her masters didn't have to return to their original world so often. That they'd stay and never leave.

She was very much like a mother in that sense, she didn't want to be too far apart from her children, especially when she couldn't communicate with them whenever they did go to the other dimension. She glanced around as the last of the Officers stood up, each of them heading to their rooms. And she hoped.

In his bedroom, Naoki tested several items, his confusion growing more as each time something that hadn't happened before did happen. The soaps had a scent, liquids had temperature, there were flavours. He'd allowed himself to rest in this room multiple times, found it comforting and now... He could really feel the textures of everything. The bedsheets were smooth and smelled like a garden, obviously the courtesy of Natalia and her special blend of soap. The bed itself was large, king-sized, topped with its own curtains. And it was soft, of so soft. The colours of the room followed the mix of dark wood, cream white and light blue, Naoki had been reading about colour theory and decided to test out things. To his (un)surprise, blue truly did make him feel less stressed out and helped him to relax.

After a hot bath, another test of his, virtual bodies didn't actually sweat or start to stink, but it was nice to uphold the image and scents played a big part in creating believable illusions, Naoki changed into a night gown, or in his case, an oversized shirt. He then proceeded to climb into the bed, his tired mind deciding that what he saw was the reality as nothing else could nor should feel as real as it did. As he curled under the blanket, he immediately drifted off to sleep, no need for him to create images inside of his own head nor listen to music to calm down, it was just like someone had flipped a switch and boom, he was out cold.

Couple hours passed and true to her nature, Natalia checked on Each of the seven. She tucked the youngest ones to bed, kissing them a good night, knowing that this time they could actually feel it in their dream.

In the Green room, she lifted a book off the floor where it had fallen from the relaxed hand of the Lightning Officer, Trajan, as he'd fallen asleep while reading. She place a bookmark between the open pages and smiled to herself as she tucked the man to bed, too.  
Indigo person was fast asleep, but appeared to be having a nightmare again, so Natalia stayed with them longer, singing a lullaby quietly to soothe the tormented soul.  
Blue lady was still awake and thus Natalia had to persuade her to sleep before she'd leave the room and check the Don.

Naoki rested on the large pillows, his frame appearing even smaller than it really was. Natalia looked at the man, fully aware that his height had caused many to overlook his abilities, after all European men tended to be taller. Naoki had turned it into an advantage though, making his enemies believe that he was something else before striking. However, the scar on his chest told a tale of one of his mistakes.

You see, Don Paravento had been a civilian. A civilian who unlocked cloud flames during life or death situation, though it was clear that it wasn't his primary flame, it had too low purity levels for that. Little did the witnesses know, he also had uncovered his primary flametype but concentrated on using the purple flames for better protection.

And so, a mafia famiglia took interest on him.

They trained him with flames, they trained him to be a Hitman since they couldn't do much else. Not without provoking the cloud. And Naoki was _good_ at what he did. Not perfect like the legend himself, but he was still quite high on the list of hitmen. During one of the missions, the young Hitman had gotten enough of the Famiglia that controlled him. So he decided to stand aside as another group ambushed their Don. Technically it wasn't seen as a treason, after all the enemy did have them surrounded and they _did_ use gas that knocked most people out. Most but not all. Naoki didn't need to breath.

So it didn't really work on him the same way. So he watched the bloodbath happen. And with that he allowed his defence to drop. Which of course was a grave mistake. He was stabbed briefly with a faulty weapon that broke, but it didn't take a surgery to save his life. So he'd staggered to the HQ and taken the children with him, they'd moved into another location, an old castle on the beach. Naoki paid for it, the children stayed with him.

... And he contacted a group of people he knew from somewhere.

Sure enough, it appeared to be nearly contradictory to have a mafia hitman turned Don to become someone who is deeply associated with the word "justice", but it was more or less just how he was. As a hitman, Naoki had been choosing very carefully his targets, studied them beforehand, learned of them and figured out the consequences. Sure, sometimes he had to eradicate someone who was more innocent than someone else, but who had the potential to be something worse. And in the end, he'd known for a long while that he wouldn't want to be in his original Famiglia due to it being involved in various trafficking rings that he personally found to be disgusting on maximum level. So him not defending the Don and allowing the wipe out to happen was both reasonable and made sense in an oddly twisted way.

Currently though, the raven was resting in his bed, accompanied by silence and whatever dream he was in, though seeing how tired he had been for the past week, Natalia assumed that he wasn't seeing dreams but was in a deep sleep state.

The servant stepped next to the bed and moved some of his hair away from that pale face. Wondering once again why this particular person was always so pale as if he'd never seen the sun and why he didn't get any colour on him even after spending time outside. From these kinds of thoughts the elderly woman's mind travelled to the Seven and how they expressed, or more accurately nursed, their own problems making her frown.

The Purple Lady ate lot of sweets, surely this could've also been a hint towards her origin country, but the fact that during certain times she ate them more. Natalia paralleled this into high levels of stress and perhaps lack of something in her diet. It wasn't uncommon for stressed people to either eat a lot of sweet things inorder to calm themselves or nearly nothing at all.

Red Lady was very anxious around people other than the Officers and the Don, she usually took this out with violence and rather odd sense of humour that usually targeted other people or made fun of herself. So she might suffer from social anxiety.

Blue Lady was having a lot of problems with accepting any kind of failure from herself, even if the failure wasn't really a failure, she also wasn't very easy to trust other people.

The Indigo Master, Natalia still wasn't sure how to refer to them as she was the kind of person to refer to her higher ups as either Lady, Sir or Master depending on the situation, well... Natalia had soon noticed that they were little shy around people, yet a wonderful communicator which brought its own pressure, but there were signs of the person having at least slight PTSD which was alarming for someone such young.

Yellow Master wasn't sure how to express emotions and sometimes appeared to lack any at all, but Natalia knew that it wasn't truly so, mainly because he was still very warm person. And because he still tried to express himself on some level. He also tended to take a lot onto his shoulders.

Green Master was a perfectionist and found it hard to accept failure, he was easily discouraged, often stayed within his own world, but still loyal to the core. He also had very sharp fighting instincts or at least he expressed them a lot faster than few others.

And then there was Naoki, the Orange Master, who tried to create something akin to Heaven inorder to spare others from their own pain. Who had decided to carry some of the heaviest loads simply because he felt like someone needed to. Who was very suspicious of people and yet acted like the perfect accompany when he was communicating with anyone who he didn't trust. The most dangerous thing to turn into.

Someone who asks for perfection from only himself in every direction and keeps stretching thinner and thinner due to acting like his direct opposite. Someone who loathes themself so deeply that they'd rather slowly destroy themself instead of showing his real self.

The rest of the top ranked people knew what he was like, he trusted them, and they tried to coax him out of his bad habit. Naoki was an extreme case of introverted person, trying to fit to the role of an extreme extrovert. And he _saw._ God, how many things Natalia knew for the Man to see:

To him, reading people came out like a second nature, with a tiny bit of conversation he was capable of mapping someone's personality down to sometimes even terrifying level of accuracy. He'd listen to the words you left without saying, answer the questions you didn't know you had, and he'd try to help if you needed it. He saw the human nature as it was and he saw each and every person for who they were, only judging the actions as they came.

And he forgave so very easily.  
But he didn't forget.

The housekeeper herself knew that she wasn't even near to understanding the man herself and she could only guess what the world he saw looked like, but she wasn't blind. Naoki often redd news papers, how he was capable of understanding Italian so well was beyond her, but she knew grief when she saw it. And reading news often brought that motion into those glowing orange orbs. Reading of the hardships that fell onto others was devastating to him and more than once had the man written a sheck to some group or sent their own men to help. And he did that without even thinking.

Then there was the grief that was caused by seeing the sceneries in front of him be filled with litter and destroyed, that had resulted with him becoming a forest owner and creating nature parks, making sure that each and every single one piece of waste was off the streets and the forests that he owned. Several other dons found his antics to be hilarious, but they didn't really know what drove the younger man to do as he did.

It was the pain he felt on behalf of others.

It sounded even more absurd when you realise that the person you are describing is the kind of person who is willing to shoot a man in the eye and burry him into one of the many forests he owns but hey, substance for nature? Eh? Okay I'll see myself out.

Natalia wandered around the HQ, paying attention to the finest of details. The house had been decorated with a certain aesthetic in mind. Antique. So you saw a lot of heavy furniture with dark wood, wall tapestries and expensive carpets, but the group had been very determined to go for that style. It was a form of intimidation. And it worked.

It created the heavy air of uncertainty, the inherit fear of angering someone who is very wealthy. It caused you to walk into the different places of the HQ with a good posture, it made hitmen feel more valued, the staff felt more valued, and it striked a fear with no source to the people who weren't the part. However, it didn't work on those who knew what it was for. It was a psychological trick that Naoki was personally very proud of.

According to him, people were similar to sheep and as herd they were used to the thought of there being someone who is richer than them who has the power to make the herd go over the edge if needed to. It was so deeply in the behaviour patterns of most people that they automatically became more respectful and fearful of the owner of the house.

But the furnishings weren't all strictly the same, the officers had brought their own decorative quirks into play, making the HQ more eccentric which fooled most to believe that it was _old money_ that spoke to them. There were skulls, there were vases, idols, at one corner one could see an exhibition of stuffed animals, there were porcelain dolls in one room, there was an art gallery in another and then there was a library.

Cecilia, the Cloud Officer, aka the Purple Lady, loved spending time there, gathering information, learning, but also immersing herself into other worlds. There were books on several languages, couple of them being thought to be dead. The heavy bookshelves followed the same aesthetic as the rest of the house though there were few corners that had vastly different decisions made. Like the beanbag.

Natalia wasn't sure why a purple beanbag was there nor why there was also a glass table and a fridge, but she did feel the urgent need to keep that fridge filled with easy to eat without causing any problems with turning pages and lots of drinks.Little did she know that the said section was the petite officer's own creation for strictly relaxing. Of course she had mentioned it to Naoki, so the rest of the Officers just shrugged the fridge as normal and usually carried on.

The books that were available varied from educational texts to high literature to the comics. There were titles about the art of fencing, weapon selections, economics, geography, and the like, but there were also fantasy books, proses and theater scripts as for the comic section, Natalia was pretty sure that someone kept ordering new ones constantly and she was considering of creating an isle strictly for the adult themed comics much to the dismay of the Storm Officer. Who wasn't yet seen as an adult in the eyes of the mafia.

From the library Natalia made her way to Naoki's office. Opening the door, she left out a sigh as she witnessed the piles of paperwork that she knew to be already done. For Heavens sake, they weren't supposed to be done for another week! It was no wonder that the Don was exhausted, he'd actually _done_ the paperwork on top of the work he had in the other dimension! The housekeeper mumbled to herself about irresponsible dons who didn't take care of themselves before she promptly walked out refusing to deal with the headache that looking towards the stacks of papers would cause.

She made a beeline to the offices of the rest of the Seven, sighing and rolling her eyes affectionately like a mother as she cleaned up things that had been left by the officers, usually due to something coming up and the person forgot about their tea or some other drink.

In Cecilia's office, she came to halt as she noticed a start of a story that was left on the table. She quickly redd it through before taking one of the purple post it notes and writing there an encouraging message for the young woman to find with a smiley face. With this, her round was over and it was time for the maids and butlers to take care of things they'd missed the first time.

The elderly woman made it into her own private rooms where she bathed and got ready for bed, her dreams giving her an image of the officers calling her mom.

Natalia was a woman who'd always wanted to have children but the fate had had other plans, now that she'd become an elder she understood that she was simply waiting for the right children to come to her although they weren't exactly hers to keep. But it didn't matter, all that mattered was that she was part of a family and she now had children to take care of, children to encourage and children to help grow.

That was all that mattered to her.


	4. Symptoms

The next morning found the Seven in the dining room, confused over what was happening to them and why things were different from what it should be. Still many of them were happy about the changes that had occurred as it meant that they could sustain themselves while in game now too instead of just pretending to enjoy the food to not hurt the hardworking chef's heart. It was still far too early to say anything else about the whole deal and they decided to keep it under the wraps.

They had their regular meetings during which they started to converse what changes had occurred to them. Cecilia's cloud flame turned out to be similar to the ones that the arcobaleno Skull had, healing her constantly. She'd uncovered this during a mission she had decided to take and to put it shortly, she hadn't anticipated the rain happening and causing her hit to turn into her falling off of the roof she was perching on with her trusty rifle and its flame induced bullet, fire a lucky shot that surprisingly enough _hit_ the target before she landed onto her wrist.

She did go to the first available trustworthy doctor that they had hired (a young and somewhat naive fresh out of school man with latent sun flames), who deemed her wrist to be broken only to stop abruptly in middle of this declaration as he felt how the broken bones to grow back together into the position they ought to be. The tiny assassin really had a weird relationship with luck.

Then there had been Casarien, the sun officer, who had noticed soon that his flames actually _melted_ any kind of iron that he held in his hands for too long when he was going through strong emotions. He had assumed that each sun would be stuck with healing properties, as he'd witnessed so multiple times, but now, he was apparently a war sun or something as weirdly named.

Similar changes had happened in all of them starting from odd new abilities or something else being added to their beings, their usual ability of getting invisible subtitle boxes to help them to understand new languages had turned into a feature that somehow enabled them to be able to actually understand and be able to use the foreign languages without the box, heck for the most part the box now only showed up words that had other meanings to them, somewhat similar to having the right page open from a dictionary. And certain abilities seemed to have transferred to the real world too.

The update log showed that there truly had been an update on the day that the spike happened and that explained the changes in the quality of what they saw, but the very same update also came with a feature to be able to communicate and do transactions via mobile phone, something hadn't been working well before. They could also link their surbonidates to the phones and make sure that everything was going well on their missions and within the HQ.

As the leading force of the Paravento, the Seven had their cellphones to be connected to Natalia's device, a fact that made her very happy for a reason or another. Since the Famiglia had a pyramid like power divination, each officer overlooked six under officers, who over looked their own set of six, each troup creating their own report which was then added to the file of the overseeing person, who created a report of their own, while they included the original reports of the previous employees, until they reached the highest officers. The highest officers then made two reports, one based on the information that their underlings had provided them with, and one that included their potential own missions. Those reports then made their way to the Don, who approved the suggestions he deemed to be beneficial to the Famiglia, disapproved ones that seemed to either hold the family back or harmed it and its image. He also often called the Officers for a meeting where he'd gather the thoughts of everyone regarding some of the potential decisions though sometimes they had to talk about potentially kicking a member out.

It was very rare for the people to cause so much harm to the group as a whole that he, she or they had to be disposed off and that was when they'd call in the eighth officer for voting.

Naoki had one extra "officer", another Mist primary, but the person was rarely online at the same time as they were, preferring to be given enough space to work. An excellent observer and a valuable asset to the Famiglia. They also were considered a freelancer whose loyalty laid with one of Paravento's allies, though they couldn't control the person either. The leader of the said group was simply called Baku as a reference to the Japanese mythical creature that ate nightmares. Baku's group was Yakuza that had a base in Kyoto, and they carried the name Suzaku, which itself was a type of a bird, a phoenix, and an ancient deity that once was worshipped and idolised.

Baku and Naoki were civil with each other, respecting the boundaries other one had, never stepping out of line although they didn't always agree on things. But the age difference between the two and their upbringings were the reasons as to why the two dons didn't always meet eye to eye. Baku allowed her mist to mingle with the Paravento as the petite creature was often a handful, her rather odd flame combination of Mist and Cloud ensuring that she had power enough to create very nasty illusions, but it also kept the group on their toes as the cloud temper often prompted her to move about.

The Paravento had couple allies, most of them going back to the BETA time as the groups were thought over on That server and the few that were testing the game had to be in contact with each other often to ensure that they were getting similar results and to just plain make it easier for the company to keep an eye on the data. From the original group that was made, stood out five people who were also lucky to ones to throw the dice resulting them to have a sky flame or something that was similarly capable of becoming a leader. Naoki himself kept close relations with a player who later on assumed the name Valentino Allegri, the leader of Allegri Famiglia.

Valentino was very similar to Naoki, though their flame cocktails were ever so slightly different; Naoki's were Sky, Cloud and Rain, Valentine's Sky Sun and Rain, his percents happening to be identical to the first Paravento boss. His NPC bestowed nickname was Credo which then transferred to his flame as the Creed Flame due to its wielder's tendency of making a vow and then following through with what he'd say. One could say that the two Primos were sides of the same coin as they had very similar way of thinking but they still appeared to be different as the night was from the day.

Naoki's Justice that was quick to serve itself equally for all complimented Valentino's Creed that took its time was, too, striving for the equal outcome.

Along side with Allegri and Suzaku stood another group that had its HQ in France. Their leader was a lightning by the name of Suri, her last name unknown and the Famiglia going by the name of Beaulieu.

Beaulieu concentrated on the wine monopoly that it ran with couple other big families, and they rarely went to the violent path, but it was known fact that the Famiglia provided some of the best assassins available and thus not a single group wished to end up on their bad side. Unlike Naoki and Valentino, Suri had chosen the option of being born in the criminal world already which gave her an advantage to many things in the game, however the old sharks tended to respect the civilian based mafiosos who managed to climb up to the top like had happened to the two Primos whose appearances mirrored certain pair of Decimos.

There'd be a meeting that'd include the Allegri, Beaulieu, Paravento and Suzaku soon, only couple weeks were left as there'd be a Gala taking place in one of the Cavallone Mansions and all four had been invited to attend. Cavallone had grown curious about the two new families and wished to find out more about them all the while hoping to come up with a deal with the two Quintos of their respective families.

And as seeing that Cavallone was one of the Great Three of Italian mafia, and a close ally of Vongola, there was a chance of meeting with the old generation. However, Naoki needed to find a way to make sure that nobody would start to ask questions or make assumptions based on his appearance.

All of these hazardous thoughts were circling inside Naoki's head as he logged out and assumed his mask Natael in favour of going to the store.

Near the opposite end of the town, another game left their own pod and gave it a longing look accompanied by a deep sigh. He then checked his appearance and upon deeming it as an acceptable one he took his wallet and started to move towards the grocery store.

As the late teen's feet carried him through the busy streets, his fingers were busy with communicating with his troops, giving them their orders while conversing with his sky about the upcoming event and how they could make it less awkward for them. The rest of the officers, few of them being still asleep due to them not having any tying responsibilities that day. Naoki had another meeting with someone so he had to do his grocery shopping during the morning meanwhile the officer in question had been asked to do so by a roommate.

It didn't take much time to gather everything that was needed and the company made it more bearable of a task. He was comparing the prices of two different salsa sauces when he saw movement on his left.

It was small enough to not be that easy to be noticed, but there was also a certain edge to it. And as a person who has only half an hour ago exited the VR Pod, he reacted. His body moving automatically to turn into an angle where it'd be harder to get to him, yet it granted him the ability to see the threat fully.

His eyes stared in confusion how a neatly dressed man wearing his red hair on a manbun took his time to select guacamole, salsa and a cheese sauces to accompany the tortilla wrap bases he'd already bought.

As he stared at that pale redhead, he saw for a brief moment his boss Naoki in the man, especially when he noticed that he was the subject of someone's staring. He had that same swift way of turning around, his posture straight and chin lowered, acknowledging him as a potential opponent whom he saw to be an equal. As the man lifted his chin up slightly and allowed his shoulders to drop, the odd hallucination fading away.

"Is everything alright?"

He swallowed and nodded, clumsily explaining that he mistook the man to a friend of his. To which the man simply clocked his head to right in thought before smiling assuringly, telling him that he was just surprised to find himself to be stared. The man left leaving the teen stare after. Before he looked at his phone.

He stared at his chat options until he came to the conclusion that he was just tired, and the incident was left unreported as it faded off of his memory. Though he didn't seem to find the red haired man anywhere either.

The week went with the poor teenager seeing flashes, reflections of the game avatars he knew well walk among with the normal people and of the weird reahead man appearing and disappearing. He would've thought of everything to be just made up by his own mind if it wasn't for the fact that he'd seen the pictures fade and show confused people who seemed to recognise him on some level all the while he could easily find more information about the red head by simply listening closely to certain groups of people, mainly elders and university students, so he had a proof that the man was real too.

He'd have to mention the illusions to the rest of the Officers, but frankly speaking, the young sun wasn't very sure of what he saw and was little scared of how his friends would react. He'd heard the Cloud officer and the Don talk about mental health issues once, apparently the woman with golden hair and striking blue eyes was writing something, maybe a report to some class, and she'd asked from Naoki?

_Sun officer passed the office of his fellow Guardian when he heard the voices that were coming out of it. True to the simulation type of the game, the chatting system was very much the same thing as in real life, you'd either talk or use computer or phone. But as the group was still working on their mobile chatsystems (it had to be designed and ordered just like in real life), they didn't really have anything that was safe enough to use. And by safe it meant safe for the mind of their leader, who was very adamant to do things that might leave traces and cause trouble on the long run._

_He'd actually_ **_contacted_ ** _Verde, the Lightning Arcobaleno, and fixed up a meeting with him. The man had agreed, but only because he found something to be of interest in the way he had been approached. The two had sat down and talked. Just talked, nothing more, nothing less. And during all that time the two men were measuring each other and their capacities. Casarien had been present then too and much to his surprise, the Arcobaleno deemed Naoki to be a good opponent before they went down to the actual business. Which had ended with Verde explaining Naoki the functionalities of a satellite. He'd then left with a payment, confused over being first invited by a young Don, basically mapped down as a personality, extracted of information and then he'd been_ _**pai** _ _d._

_Curious as to what was going on, Casarien, then known as Sayukara, stopped to listen. "So what do you say?" Cecilia's voice asked for an opinion. Naoki hummed, a habit he probably wasn't aware of, before answering. "Schizophrenia is a complex disorder, Lia, and while you did get some of the symptoms right, you still missed a few", the blonde moved weight from one leg to another and bit her lower lip. "A person with schizophrenia usually has audio-visual hallucinations and a high level of paranoia, and they're more likely to be in a confused state and lacking motivation. However they come in episodes, and thus aren't constant. The medication that is provided to the patients with schizophrenia also makes them more sensitive towards dopamine hence declining the medication will cause problems to the patient", at this point the Sun Officer decided to move on, now knowing about a mental health problem he personally found horrifying._

The Officer was certain that he didn't have the said mental illness and thus moved onto the next big question.

How and why was the head of the Famiglia so knowledgeable of something like that? Was he studying psychology? Was that why he seemed so tired whenever he returned from his meetings?

Feeling the familiar vibration of his phone informing about a new message, he took out the device to take a look at it. He had quite impressive network in Reborn! Online and many people tended to chat with him on daily basis now that the app existed. Furrowing his brows, the teen redd the message that come from one of his informants.

**»Cas, this is super weird**   
**»Most ppl ik, have been starting to get these weird visions irl where they see a game avatar walk on the street**   
**»AND I HAD ONE OF THOSE TOO.**

**«Wot?**   
**«For real?**

The male sent couple messages and was soon confirmed that it indeed had become a thing. Thing that also happened to the high ranking officers of the Famiglia. He wasn't sure what caused it, but he'd get to the bottom of it.

While Casarien was spending time with being distracted from his homework, the Allegri Primo and Paravento Primo were having a meet up in a café Sepostole located on the east side of Syracuse, where the two Famiglia's had their territories overlap ever so slightly.

In order to avoid any danger, the duo had left their Guardians behind and gone incognito, both wearing your normal every day wear and hair styled differently.

Or as differently as one could expect to be possible for them. This meant that Naoki was wearing a hairband that pulled his hair back, creating an illusion of him being someone else. He also wasn't using his flames to alter his eye colour, which made it even easier to blend in.

Valentino on the other hand was wearing his platinum blonde hair on similar style as Cavallone Dino did in the future arc and a pair of sunglasses.

Their clothes were still well tailored, but it wasn't the full mafioso outfit one could expect from them. They actually looked currently more like highschoolers than relatively powerful mafia dons, but that was mostly due to their heights.

"It's weird Tino", Naoki said as he stared at his espresso in thought, "Ever-since the latest update, things have been happening around me, odd things, unbelievable things".

Valentino placed his caffe au lait carefully on the table, he'd soon found out that his clumsiness had followed him in game and he wasn't very happy about it. He looked at his friend with his serious violet eyes peering over the sunglasses. "What do you mean by weird? Nao?" his fellow sky twitched uncomfortably on his seat, unsure of how to bring it up. Eventually the man spoke up. "I've started to know whenever someone lies to me and I've been recently able to predict what is going to happen. Both ingame and irl", the raven said his amber eyes staring at the surface of the table as if it had the answers of the whole universe.

The Allegri Primo leaned back on his chair, thoughtful. It was a well-known fact that his friend knew how to read people and understood their personalities within mere seconds, but this? This went to Vongola territory of weird. Just like how... The blonde blinked. Then it hit him too. His own enhanced abilities had something to do with the characters he felt closest to, he was clumsy like Dino, but now he was able to be a good leader whenever his own men were around, he could see the auras of other people and tell who had the aura of a leader and who didn't.

Valentino himself knew that auras were dependant on the mood of the person and he often found it to be very distracting. With this knowledge, he looked at his friend, measuring him up and down with his serious gaze. "Who was the character you most related to?"

Confused by the question, Naoki tilted his head like a child, forcing the Allegri Don to remind himself that the man was older than him by a year. "Umm... Well.. Giotto and Reborn if I'm completely honest, but I also do relate to Kyoya", Ohh.. That made a lot of sense. Wait- does that mean that Naoki also could read minds? Shit.  
"No, I can't read your mind Tino, however your micro-expressions are very telling", the raven said as he swiftly took a bite of his lemon cheese cake. "Ohh okay"

The two sat in comfortable silence, Naoki ordering a new espresso while Valentino ordered a sandwich. It was Saturday, and the two had started their own little weekly meet up which Naoki had jokingly named "Cake Saturday Session For Stressed Dons". The name was stuck in a form of Cake Saturday though so far only Valentino and Naoki were the ones in their little Don club.

"Oh yeah, got any new data regarding where in the story we are?" while Valentino's famiglia was running quite the successful monopoly over book publication and was making leaps with owning couple animation studios across the world, Paravento concentrated on Intel and was slowly expanding on different areas of interest. Most recently idol business.  
"Nezu was fired on Thursday, so I'd say that we'll be soon hearing of the Tomaso Famiglia"  
"Are you sending a new person to take his place as a teacher?"

Hearing the question, Naoki smirked in a way that made Valentino's heart jump into his throat from sudden feeling of fear. The amber orbs of his friend were sharp and cat like, oozing predatory happiness that came from catching a prey, tormenting it to the maximum levels of stress and then eating the stress tendered meat. The blonde was once again reminded of the fact that Naoki used to be a professional hitman before being a Don. That's actually how they'd met. Naoki had been on a long stake out and Valentino was on a mission of gathering information from an informant. Too bad that the said informant was the target Naoki had been after.

Naoki's half lidded eyes flashed with purple for a split second, confirming that he'd been on rather sadistic mood recently.

"Of course"

Valentino could only wonder who was the poor bastard that had been sent out to work as a teacher and what they'd done to deserve such fate. And more importantly, what had happened to Nezu afterwards?

While Valentino stared at his fellow Don with great concerns, Naoki kept eating his cake, blissfully unaware of the shock that his company was going through while roses were fluttering behind him, making it more apparent that he was in a good mood.


	5. Off-Limits

The pod blocks sounds and some of the light, it's pleasant to be in, warm, silent, soft. It allows those who usually have trouble sleeping, are light sleepers, to finally have a good night rest. It wasn't something that was planned, the game industry just wanted to make a simulation pod that wouldn't be uncomfortable, humans liked to be comfortable after all. Some of the more traditional people liked to use their PlayStations, Xboxes and PCs for playing games, while some, like Natael, had been interested in the possibilities of such platform.

Pods were expensive items, so there weren't many that had them yet, most used the VR headsets for playing Reborn! Online. But there had been a few that were given out as prizes by Fiamma, the producer of the pods. That's how Natael got his. He happened to be staring at the side of the cereal box and realised what the answers were to the questions. The rest had been sheer luck.

At the moment, Natael wasn't in his pod though. At this very moment he was trying not to fall asleep during his math class while he himself had had an allnighter previous night. He was catching up with the new Fruits Basket anime along with all the romance animes he'd never watched due to his unsure nature. The teacher was attempting to teach the class how to calculate capital budgeting and investments, his monotone voice carrying over into the ears of the already tired Natael, who at this moment decided to pull out a pad and go over the numbers of the Paravento all the while his foreigner classmate kept poking his cheeks.

While he was tapping away, he noticed that his phone went off silently. Hazel eyes narrowed at the familiar icon of Reborn! Online and so he flicked the screen alive.

**»Nao**   
**»Naonaonaonaonaonaonaonaonao**   
**»Naoki**   
**»I'd like to meet you irl, is it okay?**   
**»Pls?**   
**»You're my friend and so I figured that we could go to movies or something.**   
**»Hang out, have fun.**   
**»Whaddaya say?**

Natael silently judged the couple first messages, he'd told his friends that he had lectures today. He'd even left a note about it on the Cork board so everyone would see. So how come nobody did? Little did he know that one of the children who lived in the HQ had decided to put up her drawings on the said board, soon covering everything that was previously put up with the masterpieces.

In the HQ, the Sun officer paced back and forth as he was unable to understand the high level of suspicion hi friend carried towards others. The answer he'd received being one to be snarky and defensive, something he hadn't expected to happen.

Of course, he was aware of his boss' withdrawn nature that didn't trust other people easily, but he had no idea that it could also turn against those who were close to him. As he kept staring into the space, a set of footsteps came to halt near him.

On the sofa, their primary Mist who called themself Nyx as a tribute to the old legends of water spirits, was leafing through the news paper, trying to see which brand would be profitable to invest in. As they kept reading the complex looking for numbers of economics, Natalia placed down their usual snack of herbal tea and sour sweets, completely ignoring the Sun Officer who was mumbling frantically to himself.

A polite cough forced the two out of their own worlds, one of growing worry to his friend, one of the complex world of numbers and companies. Natalia smiled at... Today he was called Efa it seemed, her hands straightening her uniform as she so did.  
"The Don wishes to keep his other world life Off-Limits for now, and he has a perfectly good reason as to why", she said as sparkles flew around her as if she was in anime. Technically it made sense since this was a simulation game, but it honestly wasn't usual to happen. Efa stared at the woman as if he hadn't heard her. "Why is that?" Nyx asked, now intrigued as the Don was usually very open about his likes and dislikes. One could say that he was a horrible liar too. Natalia's smile stayed on her face, though it seemed like her whole person wasn't with it. If anything it seemed like she was disowning her own smile for some reason.

"According to him, this is who he really is, the life he has in the other world is his mask. And he prefers to not have his friends to see such an unsightly thing", that was... A batman reference just now wasn't it? And it also made Naoki himself look like one very sad person.

Natael slid into the pleasantly cool and lit living quarters of his. His feet that were covered by a pair of black shoes fit for ball, his red hair still on a ponytail, clothes smart casual and looking like something akin to a business man wore out of habit.

He was a lot more tired than usual. The group works he'd taken part in were eating him from the inside, stress and pressure to keep his group in line, to keep them working, to meet the dates. He hated it. Hated to be that person. And yet... He didn't hate it as much as one could think. He knew that he was a good leader, he knew that he had eye and talent to make decisions that can change the whole world of business. But he still despised the likes of his teammates. The freeloading insects, who weren't ready to give their all, who thought that they could automatically get a high score by being in the same group as him. The maggots.

His eyes got a sadistic glint to them as he imagined the looks on their faces as they'd see their grades and would find out what he really had been working on. Sure, it could be seen as pettiness, but he wanted to make sure that credit was given where credit was due. Nobody will get far without working for it. Nobody is privileged nor talented to stand on the pedestal without putting effort into their work.

Business world was a ruthless place where you needed to be able to use your head and put aside your humanity for the company's future. And those who weren't ready to help themselves will never be able to stand up to the force that was the older companies that had long ago established themselves.

It was like acting in a way, you could be perfect by your method, by your appearance and by ability, but if you lost the need to be loved and the ability to love, you wouldn't make it. People often said that he was kind person, he himself would deny this.

He wasn't kind naturally, he was kind because he'd programmed himself to be like that. People usually didn't look for genius from the kind. Kindness had long ago become synonymous with innocence and naivety, even stupidity. Natael was none of that. He was kind because he chose to. He was kind because he had learned that it was something you create yourself. He was kind... Because nobody else would.

Or so he'd thought until he met his officers and the rest of his friends during the Fated Day of the BETA being launched.

The male stepped into the pod and closed his eyes, it was time to be honest with himself. His Reborn-like sadism slowly fading away and the calm that was his usual state taking over. It was time to drop the act. It was fine now. He was safe now.

He woke up from his bed, a butler probably had moved him there. Naoki flung his legs over the bed, feeling the cold floor on his bare legs and yelped. Today there wasn't supposed to be anything bigger going on, so it was okay for him to use more relaxed clothes.

A crash and loud sounds coming from the living room area proves his hopeful views to be wrong and so he quickly threw his bathrobe on, a pair of softly coloured slippers accompanying his just out of the bed look as he dashed into the hallway. As he ran, the sounds turned more and more familiar.

Until he was facing the root of the commotion. Allegri Primo and his Guardians in his living room, on Sunday, arguing with his own set.  
"No no no! You can't just march in whenever you please!"  
"Aww come on! I just wanted to come and say hi!"  
"It's still unacceptable! You should've at least have sent a word!"  
"But then it wouldn't be a surprise!"  
"I don't care"

Woah, that's the first time Sun has been this strict about something. Naoki blinked owlishly until he felt a tiny hand tug his sleeve. Looking down, he saw a girl who looked suspiciously much like Sawada Tsunayoshi... A roleplayer, who hadn't realised how the game works? "Um.. I.. I'm sorry, I was the one who asked Tino-nii to take me here", she said shyly all the while Naoki just gaped at her.

It took him a second to recover during which the argument also calmed down enough for them to notice that the boss was there glad in pajamas and a robe.

"Ah, I see. I am Naoki, Paravento Primo. And who you might be, ojou-san?" with ease, the man slipped back into the role of a Japan originating man, using the lingo he'd learned from the early stages of the game. Sure he wasn't perfect, but at this point it was important to play along in case there was a session on.   
The girl kept playing with the hem of her skirt nervously, she had heard about the man in front of her from Valentino, but that hadn't really prepared her for the meeting. She felt slightly intimidated by Naoki. Mainly because Valentino held him to such high regards. "Sawada Tsunami", she mumbled, causing the people present to exchange looks.

Naoki sat down comfortably, accepting a cup of fresh espresso from the home maker Natalia. "I take it that you're new to the Reborn! Online, it has been a long time since I've last seen someone who tried to roleplay as one of the more well-known characters", he stated as he admired the way crema was formed on top of his drink. It was truly the perfect espresso. Tsunami flinched barely noticeably, but that didn't get past the pro players, Naoki had obviously hit the mark there. Her shoulders slumped down as she dropped her defenses, feeling a bit embarrassed to admit such thing. "Yes... I thought... The rpg part would make it more like... Final Fantasy games", her answer that came out as a whisper caused the blonde mafioso to place his hand on her shoulder, reassuringly.

"It's alright, Tsunami, I recall that the game didn't really explain much at the start", Naoki leaned back on his seat as Efa glided swiftly behind him, "But isn't this way better? You get to create your own persona within this world". Tsunami pursed her lips together, obviously not happy with that statement.

"I wanted to be able to do things in the actual storyline. But I only ended up with being a student in the same schools as Tsuna who just happened to have the same last name", she pouted causing her company to sweat drop ever so slightly.

Naoki turned at his friend and fellow Don, eyeing him in his civilian clothes. "Where'd you find her Valentino?" the blonde immediately noticed the seriousness of the question, how couldn't he have noticed? Naoki preferred to use nicknames after all, it was one of his many quirks that apparently made him more adorable for others. The man in question didn't see himself as nothing but average person and was somewhat easy to fluster.

"I was visiting Namimori, there's an animation studio that I own and I wanted to check it incase there was any foul play. She was sitting in that one café that we see often in the anime", Allegri Primo explained, already aware of his fellow Don mapping down the girl's personality as they spoke. The man was obsessed with data, so it made sense that his Famiglia had a spoon on every possible sector. After a while of intense staring from the amber eyed Raven, and shying away from the obviously female Tsuna, Naoki leaned back on his seat, seemingly satisfied. Whatever those flame induced eyes had seen, it'd stay only within the male's own personal archive. Unless the situation prompted him to make a move. "You used a pretty unknown hack over there miss Sawada", he stated carefully, catching the attention of the group with ease. Tsunami looked up at the male, confusion written all over her face.

"Within certain amount of players, only a selected few will become flame active and from that handful of people even less will be given pure flames or anything that even hints towards having sky flames", the Don explained as Valentino took a seat, leave it to his friend to be able to uncover something of this calibre. "Did you know that names have power in here? Surely, the game randomises those who are to wield flames, but using certain names can give you a better chance to be picked", the blonde understood where the other one was going with his explanation, his head immediately snapping to look at his newly adopted "sister" (in other words, Valentino decided to take her under his wing without telling the person themselves what it holds wihh in). "You think that double name could make the possibility even higher?" it was made to sound like a question, but it was very much a statement. The flash in the eye of the other Don confirmed that being the case, the two then turned once again look at the girl who seemed more and more confused over what was happening.

Couple hours passed and the dons came to an agreement over how to deal with the girl who had now become a ward of the Allegri and Paravento (Naoki wasn't sure how that happened) all the while the girl in question mumbled about being capable of running her own Famiglia. This statement ended up with her being booped on the nose by none other than Valentino, who explained in suspiciously Tamaki Suohish way what it takes to start a famiglia. Naturally, the group stayed for dinner, Efa was sure that it was something that the sly Valentino had been planning from the very beginning.

"So, Nao", the blonde man said his mouth full of roasted lamb, "think you and I could meet up irl sometime?". Pressuring silence fell over the table group, Natalia looking at the raven worriedly. Naoki, who had closed his eyes out of habit upon eating such a delicious food, slowly looked at the blonde. His face resembling that of a perfectly crafted face of a doll. The smile that played on his lips didn't quite reach his eyes that'd been now filled with something heavy. "My life outside of the game is strictly off-limits to anyone. But believe me when I say that it's not because I don't trust you", at this point Valentino started to be able to read the formerly unnamed emotion, "I simply am alive in here".

It was such an odd thing to say, but it spoke to the other man on a deep level. He found a new common ground with his friend. Accepting the explanation, and the decline he'd just received, the purple eyed Don looked directly into the glowing amber orbs. "Cake Saturday? After all, it depends on the person what they view as real and what they don't", hearing this suggestion, Naoki visibly relaxed, the shadows in his eyes disappearing almost completely. He silently agreed to the proposition, who was he to turn down an excuse for having coffee.

Tsunami looked between the two along with the Guardians, who hadn't heard of Cake Saturday before now. Curious as to what it was, the sets of the present skies tried to coach out information of their leaders, only to be shut down with a knowledgeable smile as the duo lifted their index fingers in front of their lips, gently saying the word "confidential".

The pod is so silent, so calm, so forgiving. Back at his own HQ, Valentino Allegri falls onto his bed tiredly. Unlike Naoki, who was known to be light sleeper, Valentino himself was a heavy one, being able to sleep through the sound of a passing train while the other Don would be awaken by the sound of a flower petal falling on the floor. The blonde sighs as he undoes the hairstyle he was supporting that day, silently wondering just what would cause his friend to push others away so actively. He'd actually already know what the other one looked like, the aura that he carried being so similar to his upperclassman who was a business major making it all too obvious even without the helpful-but-not-really hologram like reflection that he saw nowadays more often than he'd like to admit.

He also had quite the good idea of who were his other fellow gamers. From the BETA, he'd already found Baku, Suri and a handful of others thanks to his odd new ability. He'd also noticed just how similarly he and Naoki thought, and genuinely thought of the man as his best friend. A bold declaration, he knew, as the other one didn't quite appear to be on the same mindset about calling people friends and best friends. Honestly speaking Naoki's way of seeing his friends more as his family than anything else was refreshing and somewhat scary. The way he communicated with others was peculiar, especially when he did bring up how he saw certain people.

Valentino stopped on his tracks as he remembered the Gala that was to take place in less than 24 hours. The clumsy yet adorable man freaked out silently as he tried to fall asleep at will all the while Naoki was for once having zero problems with it himself. Any other person would be nervous about such a huge campaign, but not him. He mainly saw it as a mild inconvenience and didn't really pay attention to it, he could worry about the etiquette and such later.

The pod was comforting like a warmth of a close person, wrapping their arms around you.


	6. Something's Not Quite Right

Valentino Allegri fidgeted nervously on his seat in the limousine, surrounded by his Guardians. Or well... Two Guardians. You see, the young Don of Allegri hadn't yet been able to find his full guardian set yet. It's not that he hasn't tried nor come across with flame users enough, it's because he just didn't click with more than two of them. The duo was shortly known two high level hitmen; Theo, the wielder of surprisingly pure lightning flames was more or less obsessed over perfecting his skills while the shy Kujaku was a soft spoken sun with very powerful flames of her own.

Oh Tino had been mingling with his fellow Don's Guardians to see if there were any double bonds able to form, but nothing had happened. He'd also come across one rather explosive storm, who made the male feel a little insecure and vulnerable when near. The man had been called Cain and he'd been quite skilled with his low purity flames, destructive and insufferable. Mainly because of him disregarding any concerns about actual children around him, told disgustingly crude jokes and was just over all a big ball of chaos. Needless to say, the two didn't click though there'd been couple sparks here and there but Valentino's own flames had rejected them each time. The rough on the edges was working as a freelance hitman at the moment in search of his own sky.

A rain called Yoshua had been a happy man with a heart of gold, someone who honestly wanted to know Allegri Primo better, but alas they hadn't been able to bond either. The rain however, was content with being in the Famiglia, serving as a pawn for the kind Don. Emilia, a cloud, had kicked Valentino on the ribs before frantically apologising over it. She was shy like Kujaku, and gentle soul. Her eyes were filled with grief though and unmeasurable amount of pain as she spoke, which had prompted Valentino to bring the girl to Suzaku's Denn, where Baku had immediately zoned on her, wowing to keep her safe.

Overtime, the Allegri had come across several mists, but none of them seemed to be capable of acting in non suspicious way. One of these people was Anya, a mist, who took it a step too far and usually managed to piss people off with her(?) monotonic and often rude sounding commentary. Anya had also joined the Allegri much to Theo's dismay. However the fact that Tino couldn't bond with the teen made the said man suspiciously happy.

All the while Theo had hoped to become Valentino's right hand man, ultimately losing the position to an NPC who was named as Matteo. This fact had made the usually calm and laid back man sulk, not wanting to admit that he lost to his own creation of a butler, who just happened to be personality wise similar to the infamous Romario. Aka he was a mother hen. Try to beat that aight.

As Tino was musing to himself, their ride came to a halt. Peering from his seat, Valentino could see that they had arrived at their destination.

The blonde stepped out of the car, to a beautiful courtyard of the Cavallone mansion. Its beautifully decorated stone walls brought the breath of the old times around the building, the well kept garden of spectacular flowers, clearly chosen with intention, whispered of wealth and cultural awareness. Valentino walked forward, Matteo, Theo and Kujaku following close behind, scanning the area with their postures of faked relaxation.

_This wasn't their territory._

Upon entering, the door man checked their invites before deeming them to be permitted to come in. In the huge glass of marmor floor and white walls, the young Primo felt insecure and vulnerable. Sure, his Famiglia was growing at rapid speed, but at the same time he was void of protection himself. And now... He was being observed by the crema of the criminal world. And the Paravento wasn't there yet.

As Valentino walked forward, he was immediately trapped into a conversation with an older mafioso of the politics. He smiled politely as he was mentally screaming of bloody murder and hoped to be saved soon.

In another limo, not too far away from the Cavallone Mansion, another Don was finally starting to feel how his nerves were going off. He had been able to ignore the feeling just fine until he'd realised that he was to be conversing with other people as he was the Don. Naoki adjusted his hair, having it to be freely moving as he went. He'd originally thought about doing something to it, but had soon realised that the criminal world already knew him by appearance as one of the few neutral famiglias was in charge of running the news paper for the criminal world.

This famiglia was known as Bellini and nobody knew how large it was nor who was the head. But its insignia was well known and guaranteed its members the access to places they usually wouldn't. The communication expert of this world was one of its kind, ruling over every single news paper in the world. If Paravento knew everything about everyone and ran an impressive Intel, then Bellini was the Intel, its members being everywhere hidden in plain sight. Rumour had it that the boss was either a pure sky or earth flame, both being nearly impossible to be able to get from the game's system, as evident by the fact that so far the only known Skies were actually mixed flame users like Valentino and Naoki, only pure skies being the NPCs of Vongola line.

Bellini's newspaper was known as Notizie Criminali and it had a section for flames and flame based inventions that were manufactured by other neutral famiglias and Verde. It also had a section for newcomers, Naoki vividly remembering the day his famiglia was noticed due to its high rate growth at one time. The article had had photos of both him and Valentino in their usual attire and brief information regarding who they were and what they'd done, so it was no use to try to look different from it.

The mafia already knew him by his appearance and by his name, so changing anything would be in vain. Though he still couldn't figure out how that photo was leaked, it looked to be from the day he was interviewing a potential candidate for a position of a squad captain in the sun division called Amelio.

"Hey Nao, where's Seth?" the Rain, Xia He, asked as she had noticed that only six out of seven Guardians were present. Naoki allowed his head flop down, his hand habitually ruffling his hair to help him calm down his social anxiety. "She'll be arriving with Baku, she is his Cloud after all", he said making a choir of "ohs" of remembrance echo in the char, making it very hard for the driver to not smile. Seth was a flexible personality and thus her two flames were able to bond with two people, both of them claiming one of the two. However it also made it so that she wasn't really part of any of the groups unless she chose to meaning that for most of the ceremonies, there would be either a fill in person for one or like in the case of Paravento, a double guardianship.

Mists were an odd group to be honest, they were capable of bonding with people they either wanted to bond with, like Mammon of Varia, bonded to multiple people like Seth, natural bonded like the second Paravento mist or not at all. And the mists were the type that you had to treat similar to your clouds, allow them to drift as they pleased as unlike other flames, mists could also sever their bonds.

The car came to halt as they stopped and the group got out, each of them following the protocol of checking the area.

As they got to the hall, Naoki was fast to spot Valentino, who seemed to be on the verge of either death or tears due to his conversation partner being rather dry, and few other vaguely familiar faces. But most of all, he sensed his chaotic Mist Seth greeting him through their bond. And by the extent of the flames, he'd also sense Baku's flames wrapped around a tiny part of Seth's cloud flame, responsi g with slight confusion before realising what happened.

In order to save the Allegri Primo from certain death by boredom, the Paravento Don started to walk towards the man while keeping his posture straight and flames check, only allowing the lantern effect to enter his eyes once again. "Valentino, old friend! It has been ages!" he then exclaimed with faked wonder he'd learned to do as his days of murder and hits. Valentino immediately spun around, thankful for the opportunity to escape.

"Well look at that, Paravento Primo is here in his full glory!" the purple eyed male joked causing the few people who were in the hearing distance to turn around. Valentino winked at him as he continued, "What pleasure brought you here? Just on your way to find more data?", more people started to show interest in the two now, even more so as they now could see the two fresh mafia dons they were and not some freelance hitmen. Naoki smirked as his hands were having their own conversation with Valentino, both using a sign language they'd known for people to not really be able to understand nor realise.

After all, people tended to move a bit while they spoke, so it was natural that something like that was going on.

"Sadly, I am not here to get more information on people, but then again I should know all about that already"

Naoki felt a presence behind him and turned, coming face to face with an elderly mafioso. His mind ran the numbers quickly and he immediately knew who it was. Ninth Vongola Storm Guardian, Coyote Nougat.

The man's serious face was looking at him from above, something that Naoki wasn't happy about. His long grey hair framing his scarred and wrinkly face. The two engaged into a staring contest or sort, both fully aware of what the other one was capable of. Sometime, that felt like eternity, passed until the old man spoke.

"You actually started out as a hitman, I hear? How did you keep your flame hidden?" the question was sudden and nearly got Naoki out of balance. Nearly, not quite. Naoki nodded to himself, it made sense that there would be questions about it after the magazine fiasco. "If a group is desperate for certain type, they usually don't notice another", it was a simple answer that told everything necessary yet nothing at all. The staring contest resumed, but only for a second this time as Coyote was called over by his sky.

As the gala went on, Naoki was mingling with the rest of the bosses, trying his best to not do anything stupid. However, he accidentally managed to make Baku feel slightly uncomfortable by showcasing his teeth with business knowledge. The older mafioso was impressed with his abilities, Baku and the younger ones not so much. But then again, Naoki had to make a statement with the first impression. He used his wide knowledge to impress the potential allies and cracked jokes with them, his mind calculating each and every single thing he witnessed.

While he was at it, his own Guardians were talking to others, creating their own connections, all the while keeping an eye on their don incase of an assault or assassination attempt.

Valentino sighed as he sat down with Naoki, both already exhausted by the Gala, but it was no time for resting, both were aware of their own vulnerability and the den of dragons they were in. Tino shot a side glance to his friend, who was already looking beyond exhaustion, and he couldn't blame him. He knew that Naoki wasn't suited for the social outings and such, they drained the highly introverted man to alarming degree, though he did cover it well. The blonde closed his eyes and consentrated his flames, long ago learning to use them as a personal power bank in situati ons like these. Carefully, he inserted his flames to Naoki's person, smiling apoletically as the raven snapped their head to look at him. The man nodded his thanks and braced himself for the continuation.

"I didn't expect to be seeing you here", the flat statement made the Paravento Sun Guardian, Efa, to cringe ever so slightly. It was the one and only Anya, the Mist with a snarky sense of humour and a voice so monotone that Fran seemed to be able to have emotions. Though that one was most likely due to their Internet connection not always being the best. Efa was about to answer when the mist pulled an unfortunate cloud next to them. "This idiot is Tanaka Kyoya, I want to introduce him to the idiot Tino", Anya said trying to find the clumsy Don from the crowd.

While Anya was scanning the room for Valentino, the said Don was sitting between Don Paravento and Don Beaulieu while Dons of Suzaku and assumably Caliero from USA. Each of the Dons had their right-hand man present, for Naoki it was his Rain, for Valentino his flameless assistant Matteo, Suri's storm called Kai while Baku brought his second cloud Emilia, the very same woman Valentino had found and brought to him. The timid girl seemed to be a lot better than when he met her, so Valentino flashed her a quick smile which was soon returned.

Naoki was the picture of calm serenity himself, though Tino knew for a fact that he, too, was a nervous wreck. The duo had saved each other on their ingame mobile devices to be able to talk. An hour before leaving their own respective HQs, the duo had been panicking full caps on their private messages until their Guardians had promptly dragged them out eventually throwing them into their respective transportation methods.

As their host, Cavallone Dino himself accompanied by Romario, stepped into the room, the Dons stood up, all of them having learned this piece of etiquette from their own pasts as either children of dons or accompanying their previous dons before leaving to go their own path. The host sat down first, giving them the right to be seated once again, only their accompanying men and women standing.

Dino looked around the table, at the fresh new faces of the mafia, many of them having made it big recently, and couldn't help but wonder what had prompted the former civilians to venture into the life of crime. He was especially disturbed by the two youngest civilian based dons and their youthful appearances, albeit he was knowledgeable of them both being around his age.

Valentino Allegri, a sky who became known for taking over the area known as Catania after leading a revolution against its former ruling Famiglia, which he'd been forced into after being outed as an active sky. The revolution had happened due to the most of the other mafioso in the Famiglia wishing to follow his rule instead of the previous Don, while the higher ranked officers hadn't been keen on the idea. And inner conflict rouse and in its aftermath, Valentino changed the name for a new start. The young Don of Allegri was known as an expert with psychology, though clumsy, kind and quite the good fighter his weapons being a handgun and a whip similar to Dino himself.

There had also been a rumour of the said blonde male finding recently another sky, a pure one at that, who he'd taken under his wing and situated into another country to keep them safe, adopting them as his sibling in the process. What the person was called or what their name was, was never found out.

Dino's eyes turned to the raven next to the Allegri Don, his mind going blank for few seconds. He knew that face. He'd seen it before.

Back when he was looking to buy another stable for his horse contest monopoly, he'd stumbled over a young hitman by simply referred to as Kaze. The Japanese man had been taken into the ruling Famiglia of Syracuse territory, but they'd soon learned to treat him with silk gloves as he was apparently a cloud. He'd then come across the man again, when the ambush took place and killed his boss and his officers. Dino had been on a roof then, having known of the ambush to be and wanting to witness it to know what he might be someday against himself. As he'd been peering the happenings as they unfolded, he saw how the raven had taken a step away from his boss and turned to look at Dino. As if he'd known of his presence there. And as the Cavallone had been staring, the eyes of the Hitman had started to glow orange. As the Boss lost his life, Kaze had finally moved himself, apparently not affected by the smoke that had just rendered his people useless and eventually becoming their death, with couple of swift swings, the assaulters were dead and the raven gone.

Dino couldn't help but shudder while wondering why he'd allow such thing to happen to the head of his Famiglia, the data his people had on the person claimed that he was a good man. But then again, Paravento Primo himself was known as a fierce business man, who hated lies, was excellent at combat and had a wide knowledge of several subjects. He also was rumoured to have high morals, but the fact that the man had allowed a group of people to die really spoke against it.

He smiled at his quests charmingly.  
"Ladies, Gentlemen, welcome to our meeting. But before we start, I'd like to welcome Vongola Nono inside as he was the one to suggest this gathering".

Seth leaned on the wall, twirling a glass of red wine in her hand, she wasn't really into the said beverage, but she was supposed to be polite and play nice. Both Baku and Naoki had asked her to.

"Ahh... It's so boooring... I wanna stir up some trouble", she mumbled when she noticed certain Sun Officer who was phasing back and forth in wait of his don. Seth blinked as she noticed this odd behaviour, her hooded appearance gaining an impish smirk. This smirk didn't go unnoticed by another person, who knew that look all too well and decided to scedaddle. This person being the sun officer himself as he quickly made a U-turn and tried to speed walk away only to realise that the mist was keeping up with him.

"Hey Efaaaaa~" she sang as she went, wondering if she should either give the man a decorative dog/cat ears and a tail or try to rile him up by suggestions regarding his potential feelings towards the Don.

The Guardians, who had accompanied their bosses to the scene, recognised the behaviour of a bored mist and shuddered inwardly, fully knowing what they were capable of. At that moment, Efa was temporarily deemed as a person his fellow Guardians shouldn't associate with and his cries of help went to the def ears as they concentrated on talking with other people instead. The storm officer Maya in particular was concentrating to her conversation with Ganauche III at such religious investment that it wasn't sure if she was actually listening to the man talk about flame theory or just acting very well.

"Where is Shield when I need him!"

Naoki blinked as he came face to face with the old man after the meeting, his friendly brown eyes looking directly into his. He was vaguely sensing the dismay of his sun and the mischievous mood of his mist, but he knew that he couldn't get out of this situation. Nor could Valentino at that. The old man had them put into a situation where they were unable to do much. Naoki blinked again.  
"Pardon?" the question left the lips of the duo at the same time causing the nearby Coyote to burst out laughing. Even the old Don himself chuckled.

"I'd like to form an alliance between Allegri, Cavallone, Paravento and Vongola", he repeated making them once again question what they heard. This wasn't... This wasn't supposed to be happening. The gala was supposed to not work like this. The players COULDN'T form alliances with Vongola nor Cavallone at this point of the game yet, you had to be ranked at least 10th in power of ALL factions before it. The update hadn't been giving them information of this. Was this a bug?

Valentino glanced at Naoki questionable, knowing that his friend was a lot better at this than he was. "He isn't lying Tino. He is sincere about it", Naoki stated making the other people who were present after the meeting feel either alerted or interested.

Efa watched how the dons and bosses and their right hand men poured out of the room, but he didn't see Valentino nor Naoki anywhere as the doors closed again. "Maybe they got killed." Anya stated earning a glare from the Guardians of the two missing dons, and Tanaka, who swore under his breath that he'd murder the mist one day.

"You can tell when people lie?" Dino asked as his eyes narrowed in suspicion. Naoki gave him a brief side glance before concentrating on the Vongola Don. "You can learn to do it by noting how they behave in the situation, there are indications for it", he stated in a way that neither denied nor admitted anything. Dino started to mumble about hard to work with people and mind readers while Romario silently patted his shoulder. Valentino kept scanning the room and the auras that were about, keeping his eye especially on the ones that were in the hall waiting. Knowing that they were growing worried.

"The Paravento accepts your proposal", the glowing eyed raven stated while his friend tried to see his reason for it. Trusting in Naoki, Valentino also agreed to it as the documents were forged, signed and then copy handed to each.

Both Primo Generation dons bowed slightly to the other two, excusing themselves from the room.  
As they stepped out finally, they were smothered by their respective Guardians. Valentino happened to notice the addition to the group that was there in wait for him, his eyes widening as he saw the man. He was just like a carbon copy of one Hibari Kyoya, though his skin was supporting a healthy tan and he had very strong cloud flames. Upon noticing the direction of his glance, Anya was quick to introduce the cloud user.

Upon Kyoya's hand making an impact with Valentino's they felt a bond snap into its place, the duo shivering as their flames purred like felines.

The blonde smiled at the male soothingly.

"Welcome to the Allegri Famiglia, Tanaka Kyoya"


	7. They Think

It was your normal Tuesday night at the mansion of Paravento, where Naoki had decided to host the Suzaku Famiglia's commanding top, allowing them to use the guest wing until they'd return to Japan. It was 3am, most of the people being asleep already, but not the Don himself, oh no, he was busy going through his documents while trying to figure out just why and how the current alliance had come to be. Laying on the sofa was his hidden mist Seth, going about her report that she didn't wish to write at all, she didn't like rules like that at all but she loved the sense of freedom she was given by her both bosses.

Without looking up from his work, Naoki gave her his answer, slightly irritated in his own work though it was mostly just him being exhausted. "If I get that report within the next 48 hours, I'll allow you to terrorise the new recruits."

This got the woman spring up from her position and dash out, her purplish hair flowing as she so did. Seth had modelled her character after certain miser who was known as Mammon as of this date and the resemblance was uncanny, one could think that they were related. Naoki put down his pencil, sighing to himself as he so did. It was all just too tiring. His eyes caught the photo on his desk of him and several NPCs from his Hitman times. Carefully, he lifted the frame up so he could look at it better, sighing once more. "Caleb, Morticia.... I wonder if you can now actually think and just... Live. Be more than just strings of code on the net".

In the Vongola HQ, Brownie glanced at his own sky, feeling little concerned as he knew that they all needed to rest and fast. However this meeting was an important one, it was about their new allies.  
"Why those two, Teo", Coyote asked, slipping to use the old nickname from their younger age, "Why would you choose someone who overthrew their previous leader and stabbed them in the back?" Coyote's worry was justified, after all it would be very much possible for the two to betray them. Timoteo stared tiredly at his coffee cup, his old age making it even harder to stay awake for this meeting.

"Because of how they do things Coyote", the grey mafioso answered, "Their decisions, their actions, their motives, it's all similar to the original cause of Cosa Nostra. And I see them as people who can help young Tsunayoshi to stay in the right path". The ninth generation shared glances, surely their own boss wouldn't be asking some wet behind the ears mafiosi take part in training the heir?

The morning found the Paravento Don from his desk, fallen asleep on the papers he had been going through. The first one to find the man was no other than Natalia, who shook her head in displease. She woke the Don up, resulting in his reflex kicking off and the nearest weapon available being thrown towards the offender. Which happened to be a pen in his hand. The look of unimpression flashed through the face of the housekeeper, quickly disappearing as the Don immediately started to apologise for his action in frantic manner.

The look in her eyes makes Naoki stop feeling little silly. The hand that starts to pet his head makes his own eyes flash open in shock, this isn't something a mere game character usually does to the players. At this moment he stops to think back to Natalia's behaviour, how she is always spotless and formal, how her clothes seem to have variations, her face being very expressive along her voice. He gulps as he puts all together in an answer he hadn't ever thought to be possible.

In the hall, Maya is feeling similar to her boss as she examines one of their best hitmen called Hawk. Hawk had been a starting to act more... 4Dimensional if you get the gist. And he was obviously smitten with the Cloud officer Cecilia, much to the dismay of the book worm.

Hawk was a true gentleman to the core, formerly raised by Naoki's previous Famiglia to be nothing more than a servant for the heir. He was the work partner of the hitman whose code name was Shield much to the amusement of the officers and the Don, who all knew what the name Paravento meant. The tall and dark Italian was an excellent match for his short pale British counterpart, both of them being excellent fighters and hitmen of their own right.

Hawk was dressed in traditional mafiosi clothing, topped with a fedora due to his views about what a mafioso should look and be like. He was actually one of the few who had memorised the book called "History and Etiquette of Mafia" written by one Renato Sinclair, another one to do this being Shield. His looks were always polished, nobody who'd seen him otherwise were rumoured to go missing, never to be seen again. By his nature, Hawk was romantic through and through, fully committed to those he loved and saw world mainly through pink lenses. Occasionally his radar turned red, but that was life, you can't be kind and loving all the time.

And now... The hitman in question was lovestruck by the most secretive member of the Famiglia after the Don himself.

"But surely she could find me attractive?" the man said, unsure of how he should be reacting to his superior rolling her eyes at him. The storm officer stared at him with expression that she usually only gave to pure idiots. "Cecilia doesn't care for romantic stuff, and if she did, she'd most likely go for someone whose abilities and personality would match hers", the hitman blinked. Surely this wasn't how women were, right? He had to investigate more.

"Then", he said unsurely, "I'll make myself to match her expectations..?" que a slap from the storm as she got tired of the man's bullshit and wanted to smack some sense to him.

Okay you got me, she just felt like it.

While the brunette was rubbing his head in pain, the fiery woman -child -TEEN placed her hands on her hips in rather annoyed manner. "Look mister, you chances for getting the cloud officer be interested in you is as high as Galahad getting Seth interested in him. Which is so unlikely that the radar broke and is strictly showing the temperature you'd need to freeze Hell", well then... That was rather bluntly put.

Especially since Seth was rather smitten by someone from Suzaku, rumoured to be the type of person who gets things done and is quite high by their position, Maya mused to herself only to be cut off from it by the sound of a door being closed.

Instinctively, Maya looked up towards the stairs. And upon seeing her boss walk down in his usual meeting attire, she snorted. "You look like shit", she said to the obviously tired man, who only huffed in return. The man's usually fluffy hair was even more chaotic than usual, pale face somehow even paler and huge dark circles decorated his eyes, eyes that looked dimmer than usual. Probably just low energy that will fixed by enormous amounts of coffee.

Hawk gaped at the exchange, how could the officer be so rude towards her own sky? But the sky seemed to pay no mind to it. As he grunted before resuming to his coffee obtaining adventure, the storm fell into the step with him by ease of someone who'd been doin it for a long while. With a soft spoken words, she explains situation, making the Don stop and look at Hawk, who shivers as those glowing eyes land on him. They're full of destructive power, remainder of the Don's past as a professional hitman. Powerful and authoritive, those are the words to describe the eyes of the Don of Paravento.

"She will turn you down over and over again, never yielding to your advances, she is free as the wind and goes where she wants, you will have no say at it", it was a command to drop it, and Hawk knew better than to object. The Don was rumoured to have eyes that saw into the soul of the person, being capable of outing the bad seed within mere seconds and now that he was under that gaze himself, Hawk felt his chest tighten and the respect towards the man to rise. Of course, he wouldn't stop from trying to woo the mysterious cloud, but he needed to see for himself. Hawk was very thorough person and wanted to make sure that he'd at least try.

In the shadows, the mist Seth was laughing to herself, fully enjoying what was to fall upon the unlucky recruits who most had no idea of her existence.

Though the woman's smirk was soon replaced by a frown as she noticed the worn out figure of Naoki, immediately beelining to him with the clear intention of giving him a piece of her mind.

As the tired don made his way into the dinner room, most of the servants and NPCs scattered immediately, sensing the rather destructive state their leader was in. Only the bold and brave would stand between the man and a cup of coffee strong enough to wake up an elephant from a sleep drug. The Suzaku leader and his Guardians were left seated, confused over the behaviour of the people who'd disappeared as soon as they saw Naoki.

Baku eyed his fellow head of the group with obvious disdain due to the fact that Naoki wasn't very representative at that moment, and he was a guest there, but refrained from mentioning it as he fully knew that the raven was from different culture than he was. His brows shot up as he noted how the rest of the man's own Guardians reacted, each scolding him over staying up too late. Wasn't Naoki supposed to be the leader? Why did he allow such behaviour? Unacceptable! The yakuza leader's respect towards the fellow leader dropped notable amount the more he witnessed the exchange. And yet... These people would immediately obey that Giotto wannabe would he utter a word. Why? Why was he so well liked by his people? Why was anyone actually following him? What did they earn from being loyal? Baku wanted to scream his questions out loud. He wanted to know. He needed to know. He'd thought that by sharing a Mist with him would help with understanding the other one but it did absolutely nothing to do so.

Naoki was hard to read, impossible to persuade into following orders, he was complex, he was childish, he was all business and zero fun, he was too mature, he was.. He was... HE WAS A MESS. As Baku kept staring at the man, he soon became aware of those eyes gazing back at him. Except that the gaze wasn't on his appearance. It was INSIDE of him, his head, peering inside him, seeing things that he'd rather keep forever hidden. He felt naked in front of that man, and he hated it. He wanted to hate the man too, but something made it impossible.

"Did you get enough rest?" that melodic voice made it impossible to not listen to it. It was silent, it was sincere, it was curious, it was concerned, it wanted to know. And yet... It didn't push anyone to answer. Baku huffed to himself, reminding to his psyche that this man had once assumed direct control and given him an order. Which had been outrageous. He was not someone to be ordered around. If he wanted to beat someone up, he'd be sure to do it dammit! With an indifferent voice, Baku answered, "I guess so."  
Naoki hummed as he lift a cup on his lips, taking a sip of his coffee while ignoring Seth who was very much lecturing him.

Baku hadn't seen her serious much, usually she was a walking disaster, force of reckoning. Never quite serious. But now.. She was completely serious as she was lecturing Naoki about his sleeping habits. She was determined to get the man sleep more, she was ready to put herself in line to achieve it. And it made Baku think. Naoki had said once that her loyalty was with Suzaku, but he couldn't be more wrong about it. Or rather... It may have been like that originally, but that wasn't the case anymore. Baku's lips pursed together into a thin line as his eyes turned hard. He didn't know how or why people were so drawn to the male who had established himself later than the rest, become a big player only recently, but he'd make it sure that he'd find out.

Next to the Suzaku, his right hand man Emilia kept observing the people who were gathered on the opposite side of the table. The cloud couldn't help but notice the odd mood that surrounded the group. The happy smiles that each of them had, the relaxed postures, the kind and tender looks they had in their eyes. Just how long had these people been together? It seemed like a long time, but the game was only couple years old. Next to her the Sun of Suzaku, also known as Tatiana, smiled at the group warmly. Her black eyes seeing clear as day what was the case with the group.

There was great differences between people.  
There were those who were easily corrupted by the power, many skies had become cruel and expected certain amount of respect from others, they expected people to follow their lead immediately. Thought that being a sky made them better from everyone else. And the man there were those who couldn't be corrupted and gave a damn about their position. It wasn't hard to see which category Naoki himself belonged to.

The male allowed everyone to drift freely as they pleased, only giving orders when needed, because he put faith in his people, which wasn't much did sadly enough. And then there was his softness as a person. He listened to the others, he was genuinely interested in them and he respected them just as much as the others did him. And he wasn't trying to actively bring himself up in the eyes of others, oh no, if anything he got confused over any kind of attention he was given. Naoki was, by the words of Seth, that kind of person. He was the protagonist which was both his strong point and weak point. He had trouble with declining help from those who asked, which made it impossible for him to actually relax when in duty. The Paravento had gone as far as making Sundays his No-Work days, just to make sure that he'd rest. He was an idiot, but a likeable idiot, as Seth had rather fondly stated.

The nature of the male came out from the nature of his people too;  
Xia He, the rain, was playful trickster, the sun, currently called Efa, was loyal to the core and loved puns, Maya, storm, had strong beliefs and was highly intelligent, Trajan, lightning, was artistic and fierce, the cloud Cecilia, was mysterious and closed off and then there were the mists.

 _Oh lord the mists_.

Seth and Nyx were impossible to predict, they were chaotic, playful, creative and utterly terrifying when angered. And on top of everything, they excelled on different fields which made their powers even more concerning.

And somehow, Naoki was able to understand them all, work with them seamlessly and have them listen to what he needed to say. He'd have debates with them, sing with them, cheer them on, sometimes even cook for them.

Even now that he was seemingly not paying attention to the people around him chattering happily, Tatiana knew that the tired Don was indeed listening to them, eyes sparkling despite of his clear lack of sleep. The sun glanced at her boss, noticing the unnerved facial expression and sighed internally. Maybe one day the Suzaku leader will understand what it really takes to be the center of the attention and could lead them with stern and kind hands like her allied family did. But then again, humility didn't suit everyone either.

Tatiana frowned slightly as she noticed the manner in which the foreign sky was offering a hand to housekeeper. It was as if he was asking for forgivance. And the longer she observed, the more apparent it was, the in a way horrifying truth which was creeping closer and closer with each passing second.

The housekeeper wasn't just a mere NPC anymore.   
_She was thinking_.


	8. Is It Right?

While Naoki is resting, Natael is awake, when Natael rests, Naoki is awake. This is the state that he has achieved, this is the way of living his mind chose. But the more he is Naoki, he forgets what it's like to be Natael. Days go forth and so do weeks, even months, and slowly, Natael will eventually be replaced by Naoki. Because Natael is a mistake. Natael was always a mistake.

Now as he lies awake in the pod, he wonders if it's right for him to merge the two like he has been doing. Will he be hated for it. _He is scared of the thought_.

Recently, he came across group of players with double accounts. His fellow Japanese man Tetsuya from Varia's third troop had recently had them infiltrate his team and he was infuriated by this.   
It was actually a near miracle that the Varia had accepted another sky in, especially with the said Japanese man having similar flame cocktail to the feared leader (who was still Xancicle) though it wasn't called Wrath (Ira) like his superior's. Due to his newly made alliance with the Vongola, Naoki had been called in to help them weed out the trash, that's when he'd met Tetsu.

Naoki had pretended to fall for the faked personality trick, and it made him cry how easily the people were fooled. He then moved them into a secluded room to "cool down" while he and few other squad leaders were observing them through hidden cameras. And sure enough the group dropped their chaotic actions immediately, calming down enough to make it obvious that they had been faking it the whole time. Tetsuya had then grudgingly admitted that Naoki may not have been trash after all while Naoki had bowed out of force of habit. Of course, Efa wasn't pleased with the idea of his boss bowing down to someone else, but Naoki explained him that it was a custom and as part of Vongola, Varia was technically higher ranking group than Paravento.

Now that Natael was thinking back to it, he felt sick to his stomach. Those people weren't classy at all, lacked manners, were rude and broke each and every single rule there was. And one of them was slippery like snake, he'd almost managed to fool him. Almost.

The Varia would apparently weed them out and knowing how the game worked, it'd mean that the characters were completely disposed of. Maybe even completely blocked from the game.

The last addition was something that made Natael's stomach tie itself to a knot. He didn't really want anyone to be banned from the game, he was the type to give second chances, but he also understood that there were guidelines that had to be followed. It was the modern world after all and with it came things like cultural competence and Internet etiquette. One couldn't just act overly rudely even if it was in their character and once you'd have been reported enough, a ban would be placed. The redhead had only once come across a case that was banned during his hitman days.

The green hazel eyes narrowed as he remembered his former partner. The man who'd called himself Angelo. He'd been improper, he'd had horrible sense of humour, he was abusive, he never cared of anyone's boundaries and he was always whining over nobody wanting to date him. He had become the reason why as a Naoki, Natael had made sure to never sleep during stakeouts. He just couldn't trust the other man. The storm had felt disgusting and horrible and soon enough Naoki had been traded to another team with Morticia. It hadn't been much after that Angelo had been found dead, presumably shot by his partner, who soon became fast friends with Naoki. The trio had then become their own little team, having their own meetings in their favourite bar, planning hits together. But that was in the past. The two had gone to their own separate ways, last time Naoki saw Morticia, she was pregnant with her first child.

The third person, Caleb, had disappeared somewhere, but rumour had it that he was being taught by the infamous ringmaker himself.

The two had vouched to be with him and come to him if he ever needed, and Naoki knew that he could put faith on them. Natael closed his eyes inside the pod, starting the game. And so Natael once again became less and Naoki was more.

Naoki opened his eyes at the airport, he was there to see one of the sun squad to return. The man was originally Varia, but upon inspection, he'd been granted the right to be in Paravento by Squalo as he'd zoned on Nami, who was often visiting the Paravento mansion. He'd recently been sent to a mission, his last mission as Varia, to Japan where he'd been scoping out information of the Vongola heir. Naoki had been surprised to hear that the plot was already at that stage, they'd soon arrive to Varia arc and Future arc at this rate.

The tuxedo glad male with very Rebornish appearance exited the plane. His dark eyes scanned the area before landing on Naoki, who nodded as a greeting. Tetsuya hadn't been happy about losing him, but he knew better than to step between the sun and Tsunami, especially since he'd helped the girl during the past two months to get used to the game and learn how it worked.  
"Renato Sinclair", Paravento Primo said in an acknowledging manner. It wasn't that hard to figure out why the male had become a strong sun, not with the fan chosen name of Reborn himself. Renato tipped his hat slightly, he'd been very keen on keeping his similarities to the tiny hitman's adult version to the tiniest detail. Funnily enough, there was a book that was rumoured to be written by Reborn himself under the name of Renato Sinclair, but that couldn't really be the case. Or could it? Either way, it was a nice Easter Egg by the game company.

"You have been busy, Nao", the taller man said, his hand holding the newest issue of Notizie Criminali and once again the Don couldn't help but wonder how in hell the magazine had gotten a sniff of his doings.

Renato handed the newspaper to the Don, who stared at the headlines with the look of a man who'd just seen someone scold a child for crying. It's called a poker face people, I just didn't feel like writing that there. Jegus.

Big letters stated loud and clear that he was rumoured to be a Vongola and have the infamous intuition of the family line, which irked him to no end. In the smaller print, his feat of outing spies from Varia by using unknown methods was described to a disturbing degree, and from the looks of it, this article was written by the head of the flame segment writing group often referred to as Fantasma, Ghost. Naoki felt his eye twitch and he could've sworn that he heard the sound of a camera going off, but upon inspecting the airport, he only saw tourists to be taking photos. Quickly, he and Renato started to walk towards the doors, Renato carrying his suitcase along, the faster they'd be back at the mansion, the better.

"Nami?"  
"Already at the HQ, she's been waiting for your return impatiently"

Tsunami hadn't yet come up with a name for her own Famiglia and at this rate it seemed like she'd remain in Allegri. Yet it was clear that she was smitten with her sun guardian Renato, much to the amusement of the other people who were close to her.

Naoki's hand squeezed the newspaper he was holing in his right hand, he'd noticed the tiny mention in the corner, the question that he didn't want to answer yet. This Fantasma person was too good at their job to have caught such detail. As he took a seat in the limo, Renato silently slipping opposite of him, he took another glance at the tiny headline with photos of him, Efa, Kyoya and Valentino. Maybe he should try to be less... Obvious about things.

Or he could always avoid being seen in the public with his own sun.

In the HQ of the Allegri, one Valentino was also staring at the headlines, shaking uncontrollably. He thought that nobody had noticed. He knew that the cloud himself hadn't noticed dammit! He redd the paragraphs over and over again, cursing silently. The blonde flipped out his phone and texted his friend, silently hoping that they'd answer soon.

As Renato kept observing his new boss, he noted how the smaller man took out his phone slowly and typed even slower, as if he wasn't used to writing with a small device; it wasn't a surprise though, Naoki was indeed more well reversed in usage of a computer than a phone. After all, he'd spent most of his childhood learning to type with it fast and get to the point where he had written six long paragraphs within ten minutes.

The raven took a deep breath, soon his fingers finding the right rythmn, Renato raised his brow at this. Usually people used only their thumbs to write, Naoki used both his left index finger and right thumb while the phone itself was resting on top of his right pinky. A peculiar habit, but it seemed to work as he immediately picked up speed to his typing that'd been painfully slow just a while ago.

» _Can we meet up tomorrow?_  
« _Sure. The magazine?_  
» _The magazine._

Naoki had known Tino long enough to be able to get a read of the purple eyed dork and vice versa. It didn't take a genius really. Not when they both were allowing others to read them, most just thought that they were putting up a front. Naoki left out a long sigh as leaned back tiredly.

"You know what is so damn annoying?", Renato panicked internally at this, he wasn't sure how to answer. "People making assumptions", thank god he didn't need to actually answer. But... Naoki wasn't being completely himself, was he? Usually he'd act more childish, more relaxed, not... Like this. Naoki's glowing eyes turned on Renato and the man shuddered. There was that soul reading look of his, the one everyone in the Famiglia talked about. Heck, even Varia spoke about it.

"People think that I am naive, Renato, they believe that just because I choose to play along, I am easy to fool. Believe that I am dumb", the expression he was giving wasn't a happy one, it was one of burden and exhaustion. Renato was speechless. "You remember the other person who was called Sinclair don't you?", it wasn't like Renato could forget, he'd been fighting with the woman often, shooting at each other, feeling awkward, wanting to make her disappear for eternity. "Well... She was a fool. Thinking that she could fool the Varia with her second account, attempt to try to shift her communication style. She was too unnatural and therefore was caught", the conversation had Renato's full attention, it wasn't just your normal chit chat outside the roleplay. This was one of the game veterans talking. And it was rumoured that some of the veterans were game masters in disguise.

Renato was fairly sure that Tetsuya had been one, potentially Beaulieu's Don too. And would either Naoki or Valentino be too, it wouldn't have surprised him. Naoki's eyes became half lidded, it was certain that something was bothering him, draining his energy. And Renato could only watch with growing horror how the man looked like he'd peraoh completely. It was hard to believe that this man was once one of the deadliest hitmen around. Not with his physical appearance and apparent innocent nature. Not with how quick he was to forgive and offer help.

But this was Naoki we were talking about, the same Naoki **_who had recently shot an assassin_** because they nearly got to one of his own. His aim had been steady and eyes narrowed, body perfectly positioned to shoot. **And he hadn't missed**. Renato had watched the assassin to fall back from the kinetic energy, how it crashed to the feet of surprised Varia officer, how those amber eyes had been dyed to bright purple, the low growl that had escaped from the throat that usually created the gentlest voice.

In that moment, Naoki di Paravento hadn't been the kind and playful kitten everyone passed him as, at that moment he'd been an atlas lion defending his pack from a potential threat.

Everything had moved as if slowed down by someone making a Matrix action scene; Naoki's eyes had turned purple as they narrowed dangerously, his right hand pushing Renato to side, teeth being bared into a snarl while the left hand pulled out the handgun. The gun had gone off with a loud bang, alerting everyone inside of one being fired, those who were nearest finding their ears to be unable to hear properly as they were ringing, Naoki had claimed earlier that he got a new gun, but the model had no silencer attached to it yet. Bullet flew forward while the unique mix of sky, cloud and rain flames created a shield between the Don and his foe. The assassin's head snapped back, eyes going blank as they did, surprised look frozen on their face until eternity. The energy of the bullet transferred to the still warm corpse as it fell backwards, if the person was still alive, the fall that made their head violently hit the ground most likely finished her off. Naoki's cape and hair hadn't yet even settled down from his sudden turn within the time period that everything took place in. And it wasn't until five minutes later, when their ears started to work again, that he'd allow his flames to return from shielding the people near him. Lussuria herself (as she strictly referred to herself as a woman) had stared at the unlucky assassin's remains before her sunglass blocked eyes had turned towards the mafia Don. Her mouth slightly ajar as she'd taken in what just had happened.

" _ **Kaze?!**_ "

It was an unfamiliar name to Renato, but Naoki had responded to it with cool look. Everything even remotely pointing towards his adrenaline rush being gone. This wasn't just any mafioso who'd claimed to be a Don of a newly formed famiglia, this was someone who had been a well known hitman in the past couple years. Naoki had fixed his bangs to allow him to see better before carefully brushing off most of the remains of gunpowder he could (it was like fine dust since he hadn't yet invested on flame powered gun) and spraying himself with a scent blocking spray followed by coffee scented spray. Only after that, he'd look at the okama, eyes still purple from the previous scene. And then he had smirked. _S m i r k e d_.

Obviously it had meant something as Lussuria had immediately started to fuss over the Don, who paid no mind whatsoever and wasn't even looking at his victim. Renato had been feeling nearly devastated for being Varia Quality and still not been fast enough. Sure he was a somewhat fresh recruit but still!

It hadn't been but later until the above mentioned officer had sat him down to properly explain what the hell was going on and who was Kaze, only to nearly drown on his god damn coffee due him finding out that his new boss had _declined_ an invitation to be part of the mafia. He had stated that he wasn't fit to be in such great quality task force and then he'd gone and watched his previous Famiglia burn. Did Vindice react to his doings? No. No they didn't. Because he was still following the mafia Laws. It wasn't his fault that poisonous gas was ineffective on him and not his boss, so the task force couldn't do shit to him. Naoki had found a loophole within the law and used it to wipe out the group he hated the most at that moment. And he did it by doing absolutely NOTHING.

At that moment the sun suddenly understood how and why the Varia had done a complete 180 on the Don, why Tetsuya had done 180 on him. Tetsuya had been present. _He'd observed_ the situation, he'd been the one to try to recruit the smaller hitman.

The shift in Naoki's movements and actions especially with the knowledge of him being one to be against violence for the most part wasn't what bothered Renato. It wasn't even the ease that he did so to be honest.

It was the fact that _he was ready to do it_ anyways, his reaction being so _natural_ as if he'd been born with a gun in his hand. It was the _cold eyes that weren't caring_ at all. It was the fact that _Renato somehow knew that_ _Naoki would never miss_ the shot.

It was _because he didn't know if it was another player or an NPC_.

And it was _because Naoki hadn't cared_ _if it was a player or an NPC_.

 ** _He'd ran through it by instinct_**.

Renato was well aware of it all being a game, it wasn't real, but with how things were.... He was starting to question if it was a game indeed.

And now he was there, sitting opposite a well known gamer, a gamer who was known by the NPCs and most of the veteran players, a gamer who had managed to make a Varia officer be vary of him. And the man was dozing off, radiating the sense of security and protection. Allowing himself to be vulnerable in his presence. Trusting him.

Renato swallowed a lump within his throat. He'd asked his fellow hitmen what Naoki was like, and all of them gave a different answer. Only the fact that he allowed them to drift freely as long as they still followed the rules and were ready to take on missions that he saw to be suitable for them. A sound of humming awakened Renato from his apparent moment of unalertness. This man and his ability to get people calm down, let their guards down, was dangerous. Those eyes were now sharp, but he'd been resting for only ten minutes in total, and staring at him thoughtfully.

"I believe that you are one to excel at stakeouts and undercover?"

It wasn't a question though it seemed like one. Renato wanted to stand up and demand for an answer, but the limousine wouldn't allow such things. So he kept staring in silence. Wondering in slight panic how he knew.

Honestly the answer was that Naoki had redd his past mission files, but since the former Varia member didn't ask, he didn't explain it. Naoki opened the magazine to properly read it. His brows furrowed at the text.

"Some hacker actuary calls themself Legend 27? Now, that's rich", Renato keeps staring, his previous worry morphing into a new one.

Should he laugh or not?

All the while Naoki is trying to figure out how and why the hitman near him is so stiff and formal. Did he too read that weird book about mafia etiquette?


	9. Home

Natalia looked at her wards, the Seven, pack their suitcases for their trip, feeling little sad about her children going so far. But she understood that they had been summoned by the Vongola along with the Allegri Primo.

The letter had arrived that morning, seal unbroken and undamaged by those who had brought it, coated in mist flames to appear like another report from an informant. The second it had touched the hand of Paravento Primo, the flames had disintegrated revealing the true appearance of the letter. Naoki had redd it, several times, his amber eyes filled with troubled emotions. And then he'd called the Guardians, gathered them into the meeting room, stated what they ought to do now and ordered them all to back up. What the contents of the letter was, nobody other than the Seven knew. The Don hat set the letter into flames, making sure that it truly was destroyed before handing the remaining ashes to his storm, who'd without questioning had coated them with her own flames, successfully destroying all of the evidence of the letter.

And now... They were about to move out to the open and towards the airport.

They'd decided to take Renato with them on the mission too, each of them being dressed as unsuspiciously as possible. Sadly, this meant that Naoki had no choice but to use his old hitman era clothes, which could be recognised by those who had seen him back in the day. As he scanned the crowd, he felt familiar flames brush almost gently against his despite of their destructive nature. His lips curled into a smile, yet he wouldn't turn around, he did have sense for dramatics after all.

"I would've never imagined that you'd be coming too....", the flames faltered ever so slightly as if their owner hadn't realised that they were causing him to be easier to notice, Naoki turned his neck a little to properly look at the person, a humorous glint evident in his eyes, "Tetsuya". Tetsuya gave him a half hearted glare, clearly playing along with the slender mafioso. "Think you're the only ones with an invite, Trash?" behind him, certain long haired assassin nearly choke to his croissant from hearing the exchange. Naoki made sure to properly scan the man near him. "You're acting as a body double." a statement that couldn't be really denied with how the division captain looked. Tetsuya grunted as an answer, confirming the suspicion of the Don. Next to Naoki, his Guardians were on the verge of taking out their weapons, some not quite approving the looks their boss was given. Naoki raised his hand to a calming gesture.

"We are within an alliance with the Vongola and that makes us allied to the Varia. Do not forget our place in this world and do not make hasty decisions", no flames were needed to be brought further, after all, he had a solid grip on the handle of power. As the situation calmed from killing intent to mere glaring, another familiar flame or rather, flames were speeding towards their group.

Naoki turned around to greet the ones arriving, only to see that both Valentino and Tsunami had tripped and were currently in mid air falling onto the ground. A blur of yellow and black nyoomed past Naoki, who didn't even manage to blink and the petite woman was caught. As for Valentino.... His newly bonded Cloud had decided to carry him bridal style from now on to the embarrassment of the Don himself.

Naoki turned to his right, covering his mouth, but a tiny chuckle managed to slip through his lips resulting in a glare from his friend. "Don't laugh at me Nao", the blonde pouted only making him laugh more. "I'm sorry but you're just... Like a.. A... Newborn fawn", the raven answered resulting in the purple eyed man to turn bright red. It was obvious that he wanted to deny it, but his own Guardians, and his right hand man, were currently laughing their arses off. Aka it was his time to shine and show off his scary si- he's pouting isn't he. That's Tino for you.

Not too far of the groups a group of women was seated on the airport provided café, all of them waiting for their flight to Japan. One of the quintet, one with pale silvery hair and black eyes redd the Notizie Criminali's 82nd issue, her brows furrowed as she so did. "Mai did pretty good job with the Fiamma section this week, though I have to question her methods in getting the interview from Verde", she said quietly, making sure that nobody else but the table group heard her. Another woman, with a blue tinted black hair and red eyed, was glancing towards the group of mafiosi sighing dreamily, which prompted the short haired brunette flick her on her forehead. "Kanna, no drooling after the scoop, you'll give us out to them. Remember that one of the targets has high flame sensing ability", she said as she made sure that her own mist flames couldn't be outed by anyone. Everyone in the group wore a special type of jewellery that allowed them to appear to be flameless civilians, yet within the group was actually only one inactive. The said group consisted of "Làn", "Fantasma", "Brouillard" and "Terra" along with "Nova", the four unknown writers and editors of the Notizie Criminali itself.

Fantasma was the Head editor of the Fiamma section, the Italian woman being also the one to suggest them to run the newspaper in the first place. Làn was the head of the section that concentrated on the news that came from overseas. Brouillard, the executive president who made sure that the deadline was always met. And Terra. Terra knew how to sell stories to others, her expertise lying in the usage of social media and knowing their target groups. The last member of the group, Nova, was usually making reviews of different things to provide the younger readers something to also tap on from books to movies and music. She also kept an eye on the quality of the newspaper, sometimes criticising the way something was phrased or giving tips to the new writers.

She had been the one to criticise the book of one Renato Sinclair called L'arte della Mafia, Which had soon become a best seller in the mafia only book shops, especially the Mafialand collecting quite the profits from it. The twice cursed book was also the reason why the traditional mafioso look had become fashionable once again causing most of the newbies to imitate the looks showcased in the cover.

Nova glanced into the direction of the mafioso group, her black eyes widening as she spotted who exactly were present. She quickly gestured to Làn and the others so they'd lean closer. From the outsiders point of view, they were just a group of young women, chattering and giggling about some man (though it'd be more likely for many of them to rather be talking about something completely else), while in reality they were having a dire conversation about who were present on the airport and showing to have friendly ties.

"Kanna, do you see what I'm seeing?" Nova hush whispered feeling the urgency of the situation. Terra's red eyes travelled to take in the whole picture before she gasped. "Why is the Varia having a talk with Paravento boss? And more importantly why is the Allegri and his ward present too?"

The women kept observing the situation, witnessing how the two young dons joked around all the while the Varia's captain occasionally joined in while the man who looked eerily similar to Xanxus appeared to be nonchalant of the situation. Brouillard took up her tablet, which was at that moment still connected with the satellite of their Famiglia, and wrote a tiny message into something that looked like a chat application. The message was met with a huge amount of replies, even more as she sent out details. Her own brown eyes narrowed as she finally took in the appearance of the two dons themselves. "Ladies... I think that we are currently staring at the missing hitmen Kaze and Veloce", she said as she lowered her voice, prompting Terra to gasp.

Both of the names were more than familiar to the group, after all they had once posed at their cover due to their respective dons wishing to buy the loyalty of the Bellini Famiglia by sending the their most pretty boy looking hitmen in. Neither of them had given their real names and the usual name tags had been hidden from the view of others along with their life bars. They had simply introduced themselves with their respective code names, done the shoot and left, nobody knowing who or what they really were.

As the women kept staring, the more they saw in them, sure, Kaze's eyes had been strikingly purple and Veloce had had a bird nest like hair, but even with the slight changes, there was no mistake of who they were.

Naoki suddenly felt like he was being stared at, his eyes moving to Valentino, who'd felt the same. The two moved their heads towards the source of the stare and were met with group of five women, whispering amongst themselves and giggling. Sighing to himself, he requested that they'd board the plane immediately which seemed to confuse his Guardians. Valentino snatched his suit making the Japanese man to turn to look at his friend. "May we join you on your jet? I think that Nami might wish to stay with Ren and if I am honest, I'd like to keep an eye on her more. Naoki was about to answer when he was suddenly caught by Tetsuya, whose eyes were narrowed. "Trash, all of you will be flying with us."

Naoki soon found himself being dragged by Tetsuya to an airplane, followed by him being unceremoniously dropped onto one of the seats while Valentino was allowed to sit down opposite to him, Nami next to him and the Xanxus' body double taking the seat next to Xanxus himself, who was seated next to Naoki. At this point Naoki noticed two things about his seat; it was right next to a window and the window was open. The man could feel the fear take a hold of him as he strapped himself onto the seat, silently praying that nobody would want to see outside through that specific window. "So this wimp is the one who helped us with the scum and impressed the Sunny trash?" Xanxus suddenly rumbled bringing Naoki back from his silent panic. Naoki closed his eyes and took an unnoticed deep breath to calm himself before answering. "Yes, that'd be me indeed, I am honoured to know that it made it into your ears", he slowly opened his eyes and turned to look at Xanxus, "but then again anyone who'd dare to keep information from you would probably be shot on sight".

Tetsuya felt his blood freeze, the tiny man had some balls to himself, being seated next to the leader of the feared assassination squad of Vongola and yet saying something as suggestive to his face. And Xanxus indeed appeared to be tempted to just shoot the Don on sight, his red eyes taking more carmine glow to them as the thirst for blood rushed into his veins. Naoki merely kept staring, his own eyes being dyed in purple as an answer while both Valentino and Nami were praying that the two would soon calm down. Finally after what felt like hours, Xanxus cracked a smile and left out something akin to a laugh. Or a cough, could've been a scoff too, go fig. "So the okama trash wasn't lying about you after all, Kaze", "I tend to leave an impression on people", "I can see that, Trash" this went on for a while, both Xanxus and Naoki throwing one snappy comment at each other at a time and somehow coming to the silent agreement that they could tolerate each other. Would any of those present try to tell this tale forward, not a single soul would believe them. Hell, most couldn't believe it themselves and they were present.

The airplane took off and with the G-forces, Naoki tightened his grip on his seat. He felt the forces on his stomach, it was like falling, but he was going to the wrong direction while doing so. His eyes were wide open and face emotionless, but behind those now back to amber eyes, Valentino could see fear. It wasn't fear for death really, that was for sure as Naoki had done many things that could've gotten him dead and stared in the eye of certain death many times without any fear, it was fear of heights. The plane finally made it above clouds and with it, the raven relaxed all the while Xanxus was laughing at his reaction. He found it amusing how a man of quality had no qualms of insulting him but was scared of something as little as flying. Next to the window, Naoki was staring at the floor, silently counting minutes to landing.

The temperature of the plane dropped, most of the people taking the pillow and the blanket given to them by the stewardess, but not Naoki. Naoki kept staring at the clouds as they went, at the ocean when the clouds weren't there to cover his eyes from it and all the time, his mind was calculating how far he was from the ground. He knew that doing it was stupid and useless, but he couldn't stop. Now more than ever, he regretted not bringing anything to draw with. The others would fall asleep with ease, few deciding to stay up, but the raven couldn't sleep nor rest how much he tried. Because he couldn't feel the solid ground beneath his feet. Because he knew that there was no ground beneath his feet. Next to him, Xanxus kept observing the former hitman, his reactions and facial expressions. He couldn't help but find it fascinating, the walking contraction that was unfolding in front of his eyes. His usually hatred and anger filled mind found odd peace and serenity while in the presence of the other skies, making him want to keep them close, wanting to claim them as his, it was an odd feeling.

When meeting the other skies for the first time in the airplane, the Paravento being carried by his body double Tetsuya, he hadn't thought much of them, only thinking that they were scum and an annoyance. Then he'd started to observe them and their reactions to him and each other. And he liked what he saw.  
These people were honest with each other and their bond, they may have been of different groups, but they knew that they could trust one another, they considered each other a family. All of them. From the dons to their guardians. He once again turned his red gaze towards Naoki, who was doing obvious breathing exercises to keep himself calm. And he had a question to which he wanted an answer.  
"Trash. Why did you allow your boss to be killed?"   
There was a shift in the mood that the silence carried, those of Paravento were at full alert whilst still appearing to be asleep while the rest were radiating with curiosity and mixed feelings of fear and confusion. Naoki, who was this time nodding due to exhaustion yet was awake because of fear lifted his head with a great difficulty. His eyes were filled with grief that was accompanied by fear and pain, as if remembering the past was hurting him physically.

"Have you ever seen a child traffic ring? King?" in his fake uninterest, Efa's brown eyes widened as he heard the nickname Primo had used, mirroring the face of the man who was the subject of the said nickname. But Naoki wasn't done. "Have you seen someone to break something as sacred as the spirit and body of a child, who was supposed to be allowed to grow up within the family, be nourished and taught well and then be thrown to the wolves who buy pleasure from the seediest places run by a certain Famiglia? Have you seen the same Famiglia first vouche to protect the innocent and then sell them drugs and weapons?"Xanxus was starting to see where the answer was going and he'd feel his stomach churn as an answer to what his ears were subjected to. "I am not proud to say that I have", oh shit. This was really some deep waters he was currently threatening on wasn't it. Naoki turned away, his jaw now resting on the palm of his hand. "I had planned a coup, but it turned out that I didn't need one as someone decided to take them out. I survived, because of being somehow immune to the poison that intoxicated them and slowly choked them to death, so I marched to the HQ and took the children", the man was now looking at something that no-one else could see. "I gave them homes, proper homes. As no child should be treated like that. I destroyed what was left of the ring", his amber eyes were glowing more intensively as he looked at Xanxus again, "Those who decide to abuse a child on my territory, will be brought to justice and would it be the only way, I'd bathe in the blood of those who touch the innocent and I'd enjoy it".

Xanxus kept staring at the raven, his mind now understanding why he was dubbed Giustizia of all things. Seated opposite to the man with gravity defying hair, the flames of Valentino Allegri flared up in agreement. And Xanxus saw. Credo and Giustizia were one in the same, the same coin but different sides, the sky being the lining that kept them together. Seated with the rest of the suns, Renato pulled his hat down, silently respecting his Don and how he thought, yet wishing that he'd started playing a bit earlier so he could've taken part on the demise of the child traffic ring. Those of Paravento who had a connection with the boss sent their flames to him in order to assure him that they stood by his side, the more sensitive flame users noticing this. And with the outburst burning out the rest of his energy, Naoki slept through the rest of 6 hours that it took for them to land.

All the while he was under the watchful eyes of Xanxus, who was secretly under the watch of the Paravento.

No matter what, they'd make sure to protect the man who'd rather die from exhaustion that allowed another child to fall a victim to the cruelty of the world and the sick people one could find from there.

Naoki was not perfect, he was far from it, but he tried and that's what mattered to them.

He tried his best. And while sometimes that best was just him getting out of the bed in the morning, it was still the best of that moment. And that will power he had during the darkest days was the one that carried them through.

In the mansion of Bellino, a printer went off. The first pages of the newspaper showing the huge photo of the Varia, Allegri and Paravento meeting at the airport and having a moment, "An Unexpected Alliance?!" being showcased in big letters. And if one looked at the photo closely, they could swear that there were two Xanxuses in the photo and that both the Paravento Primo and the Allegri Primo were staring right at the camera despite of being noogied by the Xanxus look-alike. But both were propably just the light, right?


	10. Namimori

As the plane landed and Naoki's feet touched the ground below, the young Don felt like he could just slowly fall on his knees and praise each and every single god that was available at that point. His clearly released face shone in the sunshine, as if trying to rival it. The rest of his Guardians (minus Seth who was with Baku), were trying their best not to be amused by his actions while the Varia was still trying to figure out how and why he was afraid to fly. The truth was, it wasn't the flying that bothered him, it was the height. Naoki put his phone back on, having closed it for the long and painful eleven hours of flight just be sure - he'd recently written a paper regarding flight mode as a transportation mode of goods and people for his supply chain management classes irl and found series of misfortune and accidents caused by the phone signals causing planes to crash - it immediately catching up with the latest feed. A frown made it through his face as he noticed a message from someone who definitely wasn't part of his Famiglia.

**»LEEEEEEEROOOOOOOOOYYYYYYYYYYYYYY JEEEEEEENKIIIIIIIINSSSSSSSSSSSSSS**   
**»Mwahahahahaa I have hacked my way into your system, I will NEVER LEAVE YOUUUUU**   
**»I'm Legend27 by the way :3**

Naoki stared at the messages that were sent to him, vastly remembering the legendary video from another MMO he'd been playing years ago involving a character by the name Leeroy Jenkins who notably turned a raid into a failed one by ultimately charging in before the tactics of the last boss were explained by the raid leader. Not many could remember the occasion, only quoting the infamous line believing it to be from a movie instead of the at the time biggest MMO of the Western World. The raven himself was very tempted to answer to the hacker with "Oh my god, he just ran in", but the reference would most likely go ununderstood. But then again the guy was using the name of a fictional player made for a game ad, a forced meme, so he might get it.

After a while of staring, Naoki just winked one of the software experts to take care of the situation and the hacker was erased, firewalls made more efficient and code harder to cypher. And legend has it that the hacker called Legend27 is still screaming into the bit space the lyrics of "I will always love you".

That was the moment when the Varia decided to go to its own way, reminding the two other bosses to be present for the fights that'd soon occur. Naoki was still confused over the fact that the storyline had done such huge leaps in such a short time, but upon seeing certain cake shop, the Don was soon seen speeding towards it along with Valentino and Tsunami while their Guardians (and Renato) were shouting after them.  
As the door of the shop cake closer, Naoki saw that he'd been joined by couple more blurs. He squinted his eyes trying to see who they were, his jaw soon falling.

"BAKU?! SURI?!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?"

The Don group came to halt, some of them managing to keep their balance while others fell down as majestically as a troll is subtle. Naoki noticed that Tetsuya was also among them, his confusion growing even further.  
Realising who he was looking at, Baku jumped backwards finger pointing at Naoki as he was shouting the same questions he'd been asking. In the end it looked more like the meme of two Spidermans pointing at each other except that this time it was two dons, one who was a mix of sky, cloud and rain while the other was sky with the addition of very strong lightning. The rest of the groups caught up, many of them somewhat recognising each other.

The skies stared at each other before collectively bursting into a fit of laughter, OF COURSE they'd be there. Though Tetsuya's presence was questionable. The Xanxus-like person stood there in an awkward manner as if he had a huge secret of his own. Valentino turned to stare at the male, his purple eyes glowing as he looked at the auras present.

As expected, Naoki supported his aura of kindness and honesty along with the strong aura of a man who knows what he wants and how to get it. Baku was his usual distrusting yet friendly self with bit insecure of his position yet fierce. Suri was.. Motherly, leader, loving and protective, yup no mistake there, that was one kind of a don alright. But Tetsuya...

The Allegri Don's eyes narrowed as he noticed it, the signature of someone who is considered to be the Godfather of the faction or the area, each of the Dons present had it, Cavallone Decimo had it, Vongola Nono had it, even Xanxus had it, but lower level skies didn't. "Tetsu... You're the big boss of this area aren't you?" Valentino's words prompted the group to go silent again, Naoki assuming a surprised stance, Tetsuya looked away shamefully.

"I didn't mean it to go like that", he grumbled with his deep voice, "One second I was born to a mafia and the next I find out that I am next in line to be one of the faction leaders of yakuza". Suri took a deep breath through her teeth, why didn't she realise sooner? And why was Baku not surprised?

Naoki calmed down soon, he too turning his attention on Tetsuya. "Which group?"  
"Sumiyoshi-Kai"  
Naoki whistled as he heard the name, knowing it from his studies of mafia groups, Sumiyoshi-Kai the second biggest with high influence on the Japanese Yakuza, led currently by Seki family line was also something that could be found from the real life. And to know that Tetsuya was a heir to the main group meant that he was named Seki Tetsuya himself. But the fact that Baku wasn't surprised to learn of Tetsuya's position meant... Naoki turned to look at the Suzaku Don who was actively trying to avoid being noticed. "Your group is one of the clans serving under Sumiyoshi-Kai?"

Baku squeaked in answer, which was taken as a yes, Naoki looked at Tetsuya once more. "Join us on the Cake Saturday?" the confused looks around made the two Italian Primos smirk. "What's that?" "A day when me and Nao go out to have cake and relax after stressful week"

In the end, the Dons agreed and soon they were seated in the café/cake shop while their respective Guardians were in other tables, unsure of what to do or how to feel about the situation. I mean, they were somehow roped into being in a cute café and eating CAKE of all things! Not to mention the dons themselves, oh dear lord have mercy on them. The godfathers and -mother were all sitting in a cute café with PINK WALLPAPERS staring at different styles and forms of cake. And on top of that, the Allegri Primo and the Paravento Primo were discussing of HOROSCOPES OF ALL THINGS ALONG WITH COMPATIBILITY!

"Oh! I found out that my compatibility with my crush is 90%! Isn't that great~?" Valentino squealed as he redd the newspaper while Naoki hummed in agreement. Nobody outside of the two really knew if the other one truly had a crush on someone or not, though there were many who were nowadays very interested in the matter. Amber eyes looked at the page, and interested glint soon shining in them. "Oya? Pisces and Cancer have the compatibility of 85%", in the next table, which happened to be filled with Paravento Guardians, certain sun spat out his tea. He played it off with it being too hot though those who knew him could easily tell that it was a lie. The newly bonded cloud of Allegri was frantically flipping through his paper trying to find the horoscope page in order to see which horoscope was in question. The rest of the dons were staring at the two as if they were either insane or had turned into a pair of teenaged girls suddenly.

Tsunami sighed dreamily, stating with a rather loud voice that she'd wish to know the horoscope of her crush. Renato however was too busy with glaring other men who entered to take a note on her words. The idle and rather normal moment was soon ruined by a pair of slender hands covering the eyes of Naoki, causing several mafiosi to take a hold of their respective weapons. "Guess who", a higher female voice said with a playful tone, causing the mentioned mafiosi to relax again. Maybe this was Naoki's girlfriend? Naoki left our a huff. "Tennousei Kaname, level eight", the heads retrieved and the teenaged girl grinned. The grin was answered with a hard look from her boss. "I don't recall giving you the right to touch me so casually Kaname".

Kaname pouted, clearly not happy for being scolded. The girl was oddly enough white haired and pink eyed, potentially an albino, and she was dressed in Namimori Middle School's uniform. The girl joined into the Don table, earning several raised brows as she so did. "But Nao-Nii, I wanted to surprise you", she said as she lifted her bag on her lap. As she was rummaging through the dark blue school bag, the Paravento was collectively mumbling about it being impossible to surprise the Don by such tricks. The whitenette then put down a small and neat folder, which looked like a notebook for the outsiders, sliding it to the Don, who was quick to take it and hide into his persona. Valentino's brows shot up. "She's your informant?" "More or less"

Kaname then proceeded to talk about having found her own sky, who was apparently a civilian herself. Midway of describing her, Naoki broke his latte glass by accident. The reason? The civilian sky who was new to the game was obviously his younger sister while the other sky with her was painfully obviously his younger brother. He recovered quickly from his shock and smiled apologetically. "Pardon, it's just confusing to see so many skies float about. I can't help but to think that they used some sort of hack or cheat to get that result-", the rest of the dons nodded understandably, each of them knowing by now how strict Naoki was about following the rules. Kaname blinked.

"Well..the girl is called Hattori Nagisa while the boy goes by the name Alban Duncan", Kaname said while Naoki had to hold his laughter. His sister had clearly been inspired by Meitantei Conan and Ansatsu Kyoshitsu series while his brother had just went with names that essentially meant "Dark warrior of Scotland". Oh how classic. So it wasn't a name hack after all... "Their sky flames are pretty weak but they're still the dominant ones, while the girl is secondary mist and the boy is secondary lightning", ohh so it HAD BEEN from the roll. "They're also accompanied by a latent, around your age, goes by the name Helios Alanis, though I'm not sure about his flames, I can't seem to be able to read him", Naoki sweatdropped, already guessing where this was going. If his two younger siblings were in the game, what was stopping the third one? Though knowing the last one... He wouldn't be much online.

Naoki glanced at his clock and deemed it to be the time they'd go to their sleep arrangement. Swiftly, he and his group got up and headed towards the door. And behind the door was a man with nearly identical looks to Naoki safe for his hair being curly and not gravity defying. Within an instant, the two recognised each other, both being more than familiar with the other one's body language.  
"Ciel/o", the words were perfectly in sync, forming the nicknames Ciel and Cielo, showing also their familiarity to another. Valentino observed the two, his ability being on.

This "Ciel" was more confident to himself and was very much pleased in himself, up to slight narcissism, yet he was caring and kind. He also had that same leader mark on him. Confused over the similarities within the auras of the two, the Allegri Primo came to the conclusion that he was seeing two brothers. He kept his observations as a secret though.

Kaname blinked as she looked from her boss to the man before she greeted him as Alanis-San. The two men were still staring one another. Naoki glanced behind him and seeing the two teens, he looked back. "I didn't know that you were playing" "I had to check this for the two gremlins" "Safespot?" "Yeah, might not return to this one afterwards though" "Ah"

The two kept balling with the conversation, making their acquaintance even clearer in the eyes of the others, soon bidding goodbye as they finally got past each other.

As Naoki finally disappeared along with his Famiglia (minus Renato who wanted to stay with Tsunami), Baku turned to look at the rest of the group. His brows were furrowed as he still hadn't been able to figure out what drew people near him. He opened his mouth. "I find it rather interesting how Naoki goes about. I mean, it's clear that he's trying to be as unnoticeable as possible and yet he became the boss of his Famiglia and people in general want to follow his lead", and immediately closed it as Suri spoke out the words he would've said in rather demanding questioning manner. Yup, that was a lot better way to phrase it. "Then why is his Famiglia so small compared to the others? I mean, shouldn't it thrive with hundreds of members?" Tetsuya asked himself, he hadn't known Naoki for long yet and the male's odd ways were baffling him to no end. Valentino played with his spoon for a while, unsure of how he should explain it while also wanting to shut the people present up, it wasn't nice to talk about someone behind their back no matter what.

"He's very strict about letting people join his Famiglia", he finally said, alerting others to listen closely, "He used to be part of the Calderone back in the day, and thus learned the value of having only the ones he could trust within his own team". The collective sounds of "Ahhs" went through the table as the mafiosi understood what was going about. Especially with the knowledge of Naoki and Kaze being one in the same. "Hey, as a Hitman, who was his pair on the stake outs?" Baku's question prompted Valentino to go silent for a second. He remembered the man, the insane and uncaring storm who had been all over Naoki when he'd met him. "Angelo "Squilibrato" Bianchi"

Baku slammed his hands down, his eyes wide and mouth gaping. "HE WAS THAT BASTARD'S PARTNER?! HOW HASN'T HE DEVELOPED HUGE TRUST ISSUES?! HOW IS HE CAPABLE OF BEING SO OPEN WITH OTHERS?!?" Baku himself had once considered Angelo to be his friend, but the two had had a fall out and nearly started a third mafia war with their actions before the two had agreed on one thing. Angelo would never step to Japan and Baku wouldn't come to Sicily. The table group stared at Baku in surprise as if they'd never seen the ainu inheritance holding man before. "You... Knew him..?" Valentino asked carefully, which resulted in a full blown rant about the storm in question from Baku. "Whatever happened to him anyways, I haven't seen him for months", was what Tetsuya eventually said resulting in Valentino coughing uncomfortably. "Naoki may have shot him to death and his account was banned", the table went silent once again adjusting to this new piece of information. Baku leaned back in his chair. "Oh... Good. I think that I like the Paravento", the Suzaku leader said as he vengefully took a bite from his cake.

There was a reason why the said player was known as Squilibrato (unbalanced) within the game. The man had been... Imbalanced, chaotic, narcissistic, acted insanely and openly harassed those he deemed to be his taste. Not a single mafioso wanted to stay as his partner for long due to the latter part. Baku suddenly thought about something. "How long were they partners?" "Four months"  
Baku was taken aback by this, he'd gotten out of the whole thing within one WEEK and Naoki stood up to it for MONTHS?! Valentino smiled sadly to the group as none of them appeared yet to have caught on what he was after by naming the hated partner of Naoki. "He never sleeps during stakeouts nowadays and is very much keen on screening each and every single people who are trying to join his family, he also refuses to speak of his irl life, leaving everything that is strictly confidential for the Famiglia also hidden", the dons stopped to think more, but Naoki was known for his honest nature? He never lied to anyone, he was bubbly and kind, he was friendly, there was nothing that he'd hide actively? Was everything a lie? Before anyone could make a statement, they were stopped by Renato putting in. "He's not lying, he just leaves things unmentioned", Tsunami looked at the hitman with hearts in her eyes.

Renato took a seat, to which the dons reacted approvingly. "I've only worked for him for a while, but it's been long enough to see what he's really like", he started taking their interest with ease, especially Baku's who wanted to know the truth more than the others. "Naoki is kind and gentle soul, he's ready to help others when needed, even if he may not be a GM, but he hides a lot of things. When he's uncomfortable, he's silent, when he's sad, he hides it behind a smile, when he's tired, he tries to shake it off. And it seems to me like he considers the in-game world to be his real life rather than outside of it", Renato continued as he remembered the way his boss flinched upon being asked about his irl life. The man stared at his cup of tea with dark and gloomy eyes, remembering the time he'd seen Naoki fall on the floor from exhaustion, how he and Natalia had carried him to his room to sleep. How he'd helped with changing his clothes and seen the scar. Speaking of that scar.... "Don Allegri... Why does Don Paravento have a scar on his chest, only a little bit too left from his heart?" Valentino stared at Renato his eyes full of confusion and surprise. "You... Saw him WITHOUT a shirt? He's NEVER without something covering most of him", the blonde stated his eyes still wide and big as plates. The rest of the people present stared at the hitman with varying degrees of disbelief as their brains caught up with what they heard. Renato showed no signs of embarrassment as he explained himself. "Well, the other day, Naoki fainted because of exhaustion, so I helped the housekeeper and carried him to his room and changed his clothes and that's when I saw the scar".

Valentino took a deep breath to calm himself down. He needed to later on tell Naoki to take better care of himself. Honestly, what the hell was the raven doing even, fainting in places like that. "That was his former partner, they were on a mission and Angelo went apeshit. Tried to kill Naoki, that's why he switched partners", as he gave out that valuable piece of information, those who were more aware of how Valentino conversed with other people were able to pick a heavy undertone from the male, a warning of the nature of the raven who had left a while ago.

" _Heavy betrayals are punished with heavy hand_ "

Naoki and his decisions were never done lightly, and with the great power and freedom he gave to others, he expected them to also do their own part, do their own duty. Loyalty was paid back, betrayal was punished with heavy hand. Now all that one could question was; How much tears were mixed with the blood of the victims of the Don Paravento? The man seemed so harmless, unable to hurt a fly and yet here he was. In the mafia.

World was an odd place indeed.


	11. BETA server

BETA server.  
Only a selected few were allowed to stay on that server, paid by the company to test the features.

And today, was the day that they were to test something new.

They had been assembled.

Natael had logged in, this time around as Ren, his BETA server alt. His looks being almost identical to his main, except that this character had red hair like the irl counterpart did.

He was now Ren, Hongo Ren. And the era set was called Ansei, which happened during the time when the ruler of Japan was Koumei-tennou. It wasn't sure which year it exactly was, A sei-era had started from November 1854 and ended around March 1860. But from the looks of it, the Cosa Nostra was silently starting to raise its head, which implied that it was closer to 1860 than it was to 1854. Nao-I mean REN, was sure that he'd just recently seen the young Vongola Primo go around with his group.

The BETA server was different from the rest of the servers. Especially from the international one on which Natael usually was, another BETA perk. The male looked around as he spotted the rest of the group of gamers headed to his way.

They had all started out as regular humans in the test server, but only some had remained that way. Naoki/Ren opened and closed his fists testfully, the now tiny hands that were once so much bigger. He tried to draw out bit of the sun flames , but it was no longer possible for him. The power he'd had previously was long gone. And he was not okay with it.

He'd still remember how it had gone down, how the GM had been smiling devilishly to them as they had been assembled, had been assigned to try different sections. And he'd hated it. He'd watched the Avatar ramble on and on about what the factions held within and then he'd given seven of them letters. That's when Ren/Naoki had known that everything was about to go to shit.

Third of the players had vanished to thin air, another seven going to where they ought to and the rest going to their own separate ways.

Ren/Naoki had been bitter over his own luck, the bitterness and the sour mood of it growing more as he had been sitting in the table with the rest of the BETA testers. Because he knew. He knew that he was the weak link of this arcobaleno set. His flames weren't strong, he was there only because of having greater control over them than the rest. And these people were looking down on him.

That's when he'd met Suri (called Mimosa within the BETA), who was the Storm arcobaleno of their set, she'd been just as confused as the rest, but accepted what was to come. Their Rain was someone who hadn't even known about KHR series and was boasting about his own strength, the fact that they were called the strongest seven already risen into his head. Their Lightning was a tween who was too excited to realise what this storyline would mean to them. Their Mist had been insufferable, their Cloud had been stoic. And then there had been their Sky. The person who'd later on become known as Seth within the other player. Ren hadn't known what to think of her, her name being Speuran, skylark. She'd been boastful and chaotic, the shy male was sure that everything would fall apart with her as the leader.

Except that it didn't. She somehow managed to get everyone listen to her. And when she wasn't present, Ren had automatically assumed control of the situation, Mimosa/Suri as his support.

And now they were there again, meeting at the fountain of the Arcobaleno. But they weren't alone there. Ren looked up towards the floating capes and robes, feeling grief as he recognised the rest of his own set underneath them and Valentino.

Valentino, Baku, Efa, Nyx, Cecilia, Maya Alex and various others had been unlucky enough to become Vindice. Naoki, Suri, Seth, John, Ming, Charlie and Damien had become the Arcobaleno. Both groups now fully knowing how much it sucked to be part of either.

The arcobaleno were stuck in the bodies of infants, unable to use their flames and abilities to full extent, the Vindice were technically living dead and needed Bermuda to stay near them to be able to function at all. Neither of them could actually use their flames anymore, they were a hindrance.

Valentino, he'd been called Gabriele on this server, kneeled down next to Ren, his bandaged arms wrapping around the infant. He couldn't really speak anymore, that's what being undead had caused to some of them, but the Rain's presence more or less gave out what he wanted to say and do.

Vindice were a group of reanimated corpses of the former arcobalenos, those whose flames were forcefully sucked out of them, painfully twisting and burning their minds and bodies. Most of them were now nothing but ashen corpses held together by the Flame of the Night, the ultimate desperation of the former Sky flame user, Bermuda. The Vindice couldn't smile, they couldn't laugh, they couldn't cry, they had no voice to scream their agony, it was torture to be one.

Ren closed his eyes and leaned to his friend's touch, allowing the little warmth he was capable of radiating to be touching Valen-Gabriele. This would be his fate too would this go on until the next rainbow battle.

And then there was the greatest joke of all time.

The BETA server was the only server capable of connecting to the other servers. What they did here, would be directly affecting other servers. Why? Because technically, this server was the past and the other servers were the present. How did they know?

The Vindice.

Within every single server, the Vindice had NPCs that carried certain names to them. And one of them had been Ren Hongo. On top of this, some of the players had found out that their characters had family trees that traced back to these NPCs.  
Renato Sinclair? The grandson of Ren Hongo five times removed. Ren's main? The nephew of Ren Hongo six times removed. Suri? Granddaughter of Gabriele five times removed. It had been a nice yet confusing Easter egg. But also terrifying. Because this meant that the game was actually recording their behaviour patterns to be used on these NPCs. Some would argue that it was an honour, but Ren disagreed. It was scary, especially when the company hadn't told them that they'd do something like that. Sure, they could sue them for it, but it wasn't exactly the same thing as an identity theft or insult of one's honour. The court would probably even laugh at them for it. Who sues someone over something like a character made based on yourself if the character isn't done with malicious intent. Imagine the flames that'd go up in the Internet over that mess too.

Ren looked around the faces who'd gathered there, seeing the reflections of their mains as he so did, knowing that they were seeing it too. Now the question was... Why were they summoned on the server? There weren't supposed to be anything new coming up into the game.

A tattered tophat rolled onto the clearing and the gamers grimaced. It was the representative of the company, who had assumed the role of a widely grinning assistant of Checkerface. Oh joy. The male hopped out of the hat and pulled out a megaphone, this wasn't going to end well.

"GOOOD AFTERNOOON ARCOBALENO AND VINDICEEEEE", he screamed from the top of his lungs resulting in more than one player to cover their ears in pain. "WE ARE HERE TODAY TOOO", "Shut the FUCK UP YOU MORON"  
Well then. The rain arcobaleno got fed up very fast. The tiny silverette was now jumping up and down angrily, his mouth spewing utter nonsense. "Can you FINALLY explain to us why the FUCK we're small and why in HELL the so called STRONGEST SEVEN INCLUDES that red-haired bastard WHOSE STATS ARE WEAKEST OF US ALL!!!"

The world seemed to come to halt, the Vindice, or the players who were close to Ren/Naoki, turned to openly glare the rain from behind their bandages. Ren fidgeted on his place, this wasn't good, not good at all. The fool kept shouting and screaming, demanding that his friend would be given the right to return to the game, to become the sun arcobaleno in Ren's stead. And the male in top hat looked at him grimly, clearly unhappy with what he saw.

Ren recognised him as Gabriele's main's lighting guardian and sighed inwardly. Of course he'd react like that, of course this was going to happen.

When the male finally calmed down, Ren was staring at the water, and his reflection. "Are you finally done, Damien?" he asked quietly pulling the attention to himself effectively. He'd had enough. Natael had had enough. This man was trying to destroy the place he loved, where he was capable of feeling that he had a place in, where he belonged. Damien looked down on him, cold eyes filled with sense of superiority.

Ren lifted his head and looked straight at him.

"My flames do not define me nor my strength. I learned to control them to the level where I can make more damage than you with your flames. My skill set is actually higher than you can see, I am not allowing you to see it as it is because _I. Don't. Trust. You._ _Do you know why Angelo was banned_? **_Do you?_** It was because _he went too far_. Because **_he broke the rules_**. Because he harassed other players. Where's my proof? Have you ever seen me wear anything that doesn't cover me from head to toe _**after**_ I met him? _Have you **seen**_ how others react to the mere _**mention of that name**_? _I don't think you have_. _I don't think that you're able to fully comprehend the situation_. _I don't see that you're capable of doing so, **you lack maturity**_ ", Damien opened his mouth, but wasn't given the chance to speak, " _You think that **I don't know how things are**_? _You think that **I paid my way into the ranks** of Arcobaleno_? _**You don't get**_ it do you? ** _I didn't want to be an Arcobaleno_**. _**I didn't want to be a Sky**_ on the other server, but here I am, because ** _I have terrible luck_**. You're going to say that you don't want to speak about it, _you're going to try deny what I just said_ , but _we both know how things are_. If you really have a problem with me, _then challenge me_ openly to a duel, then challenge me in a setting where we're both capable of using our full abilities, then _**prove your point**_ instead of throwing demands around. Draw your weapon and attack instead of placing demands and orders when you do not have the right to and for the love of God _**stop trying to force your opinion on others**_ ".

The spring fell silent, it was a lot to be taken in. It was a long speech that he delivered, it was filled with passion, it was filled with pain, it was filled with need to get the point across. And he wasn't directing it to anyone else than to Damien. Damien, who was now staring at him his jaw hanging from shock. Ren hadn't cursed even once. Ren hadn't yelled. Ren had used something else.

He'd used _**WEIGHT**_ on words to carry his message through.

Baku looked at Ren, his mind coming to the conclusion that he finally understood the whole deal behind the male. He didn't allow others to carry his own burden. He worked it out himself.

The company representative clapped slowly at the spectacle. His face void of emotion, he wouldn't expect less from Ren, after all, he'd been involved with the creation of Ren Hongo NPC and seen how the character reacted to things. The King, who didn't wish for the crown was the one people loved after all.

"Splendid, splendid indeed", he said reminding them of his presence, "I guess that we can work this through. A duel, you said, hmm?"  
Ren nodded to the man, who snapped his fingers, temporarily taking off the Arcobaleno curse from the two elements. "Now then... Have at each other".

Eyes were locked to another, Ren's turning yellow from him using the flames to better his healing rate. Weapons were drawn, sword against an old handgun, knives and daggers, everything was allowed.

Ren loaded his gun as he dodged the sword thirsting for his neck.  
"You won't be able to get me with such a bad gun Ren!" Damien shouted as he swung his weapon again making the sun in question snort.  
"I need only one shot, Damien", is all he said as he danced around the swordsman. The more he missed, the angrier Damien got and on the sidelines, was another conversation going on as Valen-Gabriele was having a talk with the GM.

"Is it possible to get rid off of a flame bond ingame or replace it?" the Vindice asked as he followed the fight with his eyes. Nao-Ren was a loyal friend of his and he didn't want to be affiliated with the vengeful rain that was in his group. The GM looked at him sympathetically before turning away, clearly not liking Damien either. "I'd go to the Vongola, talking to Ganauche III will give you the option to end a bond, but as a sky... It can have consequences for your former guardian", the GM then laughed a bit, "Funnily enough, you are the only sky we haven't been able to match with many of the players. But NPCs on the other hand...", he whistled, "you are just right for them".

Ren saw an opening and pulled the trigger. Damien only laughed at it trying to deflect it with his sword.

....only for the bullet to MELT through the metal and still hit him. The yellow glowing piece of iron flew right into Damien's eye, effectively destroying the eyeball in the socket.  
The rain arcobaleno yelled from pain and grief as he fell on his knees, hand pressing against the oozing eyeless socket. Ren looked at him, serious as a grave and just as uncaring. The flames dying out from his eyes as he deemed the other one having lost. "Your technique was horrible and posture just wrong, I take it that you've never held a sword in your life?"   
"And you have?" Damien snarled at the red haired figure in front of him. Ren blinked. "Actually... I have. I did kendo for several years and I also learned how to fence just for the sake of it. It's pretty useful to look around in game and find courses for things", Gabriele snorted, that was clearly not the case. He'd met Ren a long time ago and noticed the way he walked from the first day. Whoever he was while not in a pod, he had known how sword fighting had worked before he'd started the game. And he totally hadn't been taking classes from the dojo, they didn't teach the kinds of movements he had.

Ren finally decided to walk away, but Damien wasn't clearly having it. As the red head turned around, the rain bounced on his feet with a knife on his hand, dashing towards oblivious Ren. Or seemingly oblivious.

Feeling the air current that was coming from behind of him, Ren pulled out a dagger, slowly without a sound, from his sleeve. It looked more as if he was fixing the sleeve if anything. And when he deemed the timing to be right, he made a quick sidestep and struck the knife into Damien.  
"Do you know what they say about men? You get to their heart through their stomach", he hissed right before he pulled the blade out. This time. This time, there was no mercy for Damien. He stumbled couple steps behind and hit the ground. Blood oozed out of his wounds and dribbled from his mouth. Ren closed his eyes, reminding himself once again, that it was all just a game. He kneeled next to Damien and took a hold of his shirt, cleaning his dagger into it as he so did. Damien would later on respawn to the server, that's how deaths were treated on BETA system. On the regular ones though? Not a chance. You were sent to a different face. This was how the system was to those who didn't pay for the resurrection or died from things like explosions.

Ren walked to the group eyes temporarily lifeless looking and stern. He looked at the rest of his fellow arcobalenos. "Any others?"   
And then he returned into the infant body, soon to be cuddled by his friends, who kept telling him to never do such things again. The mist arcobaleno looked at the GM. "Is this why he's an arcobaleno? Because he is good at the game? Or did he pay?", she asked, wanting to make sure. The GM smiled mischievously. "We made him an Arcobaleno because we knew that he'd hate it. Oh and also, we found it interesting how the system was having trouble with choosing his flames, probably a glitch in the early system, but that's what happened. His abilities though? He earned them with hard work".

It turned out that the company had wanted to test the arcobaleno change along with the combat system more, and thus had called them together. As per usual, the testers were paid a tiny sum of money for their troubles before the BETA server closed off once again.

As Valentino walked down the halls of his mansion, he came across Theo himself. The man had obviously not learnt his lesson as he handed in his plead of leaving the Allegri Famiglia. The eyes of the lightning were hard as a stone, his mind set. He'd leave all together.

"What are you going to do next?", "Lock my account permanently and delete my characters", "I see".

Theo took out his weapon of choice, a spear and was ready to strike Valentino down before he'd go after the Paravento Primo. "No hard feelings.... "boss" ", he didn't get to do a thing though as a shot echoed in the hall and Theodore fell on the ground dead as a stone. Valentino looked to his side where the shot had come from. His eyes widened in disbelief.

There stood his right hand man, Matteo, his eyes glowing green and gun still smokin, electric current fizzing on it.

He'd thought that the bond he shared had been with Theo, he'd thought that Matteo was flameless.

 **He wasn't**.

Matteo growled lowly to the corpse eyes narrow. The sentence he'd heard only a while ago suddenly made more sense to him. It was no wonder that he hadn't found his full set yet, he'd been looking from the wrong crowd all along.  
Matteo enveloped the don into a hug, fuzzing over him as he checked if there were any wounds. Valentino smiled to him.

It was better this way. 


	12. Two Soldiers

Naoki wasn't being himself, that much was clear to the people around, but they didn't dare to ask what was wrong. They feared that he'd snap if they did. The Don was phasing back and forth in the assembly room, his eyes filled with nervousness and grief. He knew what was coming. He felt it.

Valentino had called him last evening, the male had been panicking, told him that his Lightning Theo hadn't been his. He'd been someone else's. And he'd attacked him. He'd gone rogue. He'd assumed that Valentino had warned the others, his assumption had been correct. And they all knew what Theo/Damien was after.

 _He wanted to separate them from another_.

Because he knew that they wouldn't meet up IRL maybe ever.

Because he knew that _Naoki wouldn't meet them IRL_ ever if he could.

There were speculations as to why, some thought that his home life had been awful and that's why he'd decided so, others thought that he was a sheltered son of some rich business man, locked into his room. Neither of them was true. He just... Wasn't comfortable with meeting, with talking, face to face, people tended to judge him based on his looks too much. Treat him like an idiot just because he looked younger than he was.   
He was the son of an army man, captain level, and because of that he knew how to defend himself, his mother was a scholar and thus he had learned to think for himself. But he'd also been born with a weak health and thus had been separated from his peers until late teenhood and now.. He didn't know how to act when not in the atmosphere of the safety of the Reborn! Online. He had wits, he had strength, he had class. But he lacked proper social skills. And it scared him.  
Scared him to see all those children run around and use words he'd never thought a child would use, seen his own age group act oh so childishly, seen adults yell to their children, make them scared of themselves, feel unworthy. And he'd felt sick.

His values were a bit old fashioned, that was true, but he was more aware and accepting than others, it seemed. He held himself in certain way, he talked in certain way, he rarely raised his voice, he rarely cursed. And hearing it made him flinch.

Naoki admitted that he was soft by his nature, but he'd also learnt to be tough as steel and bendy as a bamboo.   
This had been often seen as a weakness in the eyes of the other boys while he was growing up, but he was never physically attacked as the others knew that he was "fragile" as the teachers would state. And so they used verbal attacks, which stuck to him for a long while.

Naoki stopped on his tracks as he felt the lightning that was creeping closer, his eyes narrowed. Matteo had apparently shot Theo and he'd died, but judging from how the arrogant man was coming closer, it seemed like... "The bastard used a paid respawn", he muttered, ordering the nearest butler to get him his pistol. As the butler dashed into the weapon room, Naoki threw off his cape (he only wore it because his Guardians claimed that he needed to look cool when it was windy) his eyes fixed on the door.

His Guardians followed his actions, all of them remembering what had gone down two days ago. Trajan's eyes turned cold, so that same guy was coming after the boss over something as petty as losing a duel? Pathetic.

Theo bursted into the room holding his spear in his right hand, blood trickling down from the tip. Upon seeing the blood, Naoki's blood ran cold. His eyes now assuming the purple glow, signaling those near him that he was dead serious.  
"You try to murder your own boss, my best friend, then you break in here and obviously either hurt or killed someone... Oh and you paid for a resurrection instead of accepting the new server where you'd never have to see any of us again.. And you think that I am the pay-to-win here?"  
Theo didn't answer, but lunged at Naoki, his spear crackling with electricity. Naoki's eyes turned into slits. He could always try to use harmonisation factor, but it'd take time before it'd get to Theo. God, he needed to kill this guy off didn't he.

Cecilia slipped into the hall, bad feeling in her gut. As she went, she was joined by few of the battle minds and butlers.  
Room after room, they didn't find anyone who'd been killed or hurt. Until the front doors.

Hawk laid there, his eyes closed and breath heavy, his stomach having a huge wound from a spear. He opened his eyes and looked at the Cloud Officer. "Ah.. Miss Cecilia.. You. You look even more beautiful than yesterday", he said weakly, smiling before that very same smile turned into painful grunt. Cecilia kneeled next to him and called her own flames forward. "If you think that I'll let you die, you're a fool, Hawk", Hawk chuckled at her determination, still very much in love with the petite woman. "Jean, my name is Jean. Jean Faucon, miss Cecilia".

Naoki hissed from pain as he accidentally landed on his left wrist, it was sure to make aiming harder. Hopefully he didn't sprain it. The was a lot better with spear than he was with a sword, that was sure. And within the short time period, Naoki had taken slight damage that'd later on show as bruises on his person. He idly wondered how long it'd take him to heal from them. He wanted to grin at the chance of pace, the thrill of danger, the fact that he felt this to be challenging. He hadn't even known that he'd missed action before this.

From the corner of his eye, he noticed how Cecilia returned with limping Hawk and he once again remembered why he was fighting in the first place. To protect his own.

_[Special skill activated]_

He had no time to wonder what the system meant as he danced away from the weapon. He needed to have space between him and Theo.

Naoki rolled to the floor, barely avoiding the direct hit to his eye, the blade grazing his cheek. Where'd he felt this before...

_Knife came down with brute force as Angelo tried to get rid of his prey. Prey that had refused to take part in his play time. He had no desire for such pest to be around, especially if they held a threat to his position. The blade bit into the chest of the younger man, delicious gasp of pain escaping from his throat. Kaze's eyes widened. Don't stop there my darling, twist it, make it HURT. Weakly the raven lift his pistol and shot. The bullet hit Angelo's wrist rendering his dominant hand useless. Angelo screeched like a vulture, backing off of the lion cub, who immediately bolted to safety._

Ahh.. Yes.. Budapest. The day he got his scar because of defending himself. Naoki held the pistol in his hand and felt the throbbing pain. His flames gathered into the bullet. He wasn't really one for some flashy techniques with activation words, with power words, he actually had only two moves like that. Otherwise he'd work swiftly and silently as the wind he'd been given his nickname after.

He lifted the pistol, still ignoring the pain that told him not to do it. There was no other choice. The rest of his flames, their signature colours, bled into his eyes. "Colpo di giustizia...", he purred softly as he pulled the trigger. This was the ace in his sleeve. The shot that tried to rival the infamous Colpo del Caos, Chaos Shot, of Reborn. It wasn't as powerful as it was, after all Naoki preferred to leave the building standing, but it was equally terrifying.

The bullet that had been completely filled with his flames flew towards Theo. The rain attribute targeted the rogue lightning slowing him down to the slug like speed. The sky attribute first overpowered the opponent's flames. The bullet hit its mark, right in mode of Theo's forehead. The combination of sky and cloud vibrating together faster and faster, Naoki turned away, his Guardians doing the same.

And Theo's head exploded from the sheer pressure. Naoki took a long breath before he'd look at the work of his hands, feeling sick over the usage of the said ability. "He's dead." he stated grimly to his audience, each of them turning to look, except for Nyx. And Naoki could understand why as the mist decided to leave to their room and take a hot bath. Naoki looked at Natalia with pleading eyes and the old woman nodded.   
Out of the group, only Naoki knew for sure what was going on with each of his Guardians, though there were also tag teams that communicated with each other like Cecilia and Nyx, but in the end Naoki got all the strings in his hands and no one else.  
They all had problems, and they were working hard to solve them. They didn't necessarily talk about the problems to their underlings, but behind the closed doors, there were regular check ups from each other.

Naoki helped the maids to clean up the still smoking body, his both sky and rain attribute taking care of the stray flames that sometimes were left behind by players and NPCs alike. These traces were mostly harmless, but they could do damage if left unrooted, especially if the deceased had been hostile. With what had just come down, the young boss didn't want to take any chances. Lightning type especially had the tendency of staying after its user due to its nature. The weapon that was now laying on the floor was left untouched until the nearest butler got himself a pair of flame resistant gloves.

They wrapped both the body and the weapon into large piece of fabric, also flame resistant and disposed of both of them with the help of the Storm officer as her ability to disingrenate everything came in handy. The ashes were gathered into a pouch that was then given to the Vindice that'd appeared little too late to take care of the attack.

Naoki stared at group with sad and uncomfortable feeling in his stomach. The NPCs weren't just that anymore, that was clear. They'd witnessed it in the ring battles that they'd been watching week before from their hidden places. Their eyes weren't just empty anymore, there were thoughts that went behind them, there were emotions in them. It was scary in a way, but also it... Wasn't? Naoki took out his phone and informed others of what happened, soon being answered by the rest of the dons of their little circle. Most were asking if he was sure that it was over, but telling them that he'd basically shoved a grenade down to Theo's throat pretty much silenced them.

**»Trash, you got the scum out of the way?**

Naoki furrowed his brows, that wasn't Tetsuya.. Tetsuya's messages were little but gentler than this.

**«Xanxus? Yes, I used Colpo di giustizia, bis head exploded.**   
**»You did good. I'm now letting the Double Trash back in.**   
**»I'm so sorry! I didn't think that he'd take my communicator!**   
**«It's fine Tetsu, it just surprised me.**

Feeling suddenly claustrophobic, Naoki decided to go out on a walk. The garden behind the mansion was a sanctuary for the man, who'd grown up in a big house with a huge garden. He was joined by his Guardians, even Nyx who had taken one of the Mist corridors to avoid the room that still smelled like death. The raven laid down on the grass, staring at the sky, eyes unreadable. The others sat down as well silently giving the man support. Silence fell over them like a blanket made out of clouds.  
The sky was bluer than usual, the clouds dyed in white and grey, some pink, the birds were chirping happily in the afternoon. In the garden filled with roses, hortences and many other flowers, the Seven were now taking a break. It's been a long while since they'd done so. And the feeling was nice.

The world was passing by, nobody would speak, but there was no need for talking in that moment.

Naoki looked at the clouds, their shapes reminding him of the past. Guess he could finally explain why he was like he was.

"... I grew up with a fragile health", his Guardians perked up from hearing his quiet words. "I was showered with love from my family, but there was always, always the sense of grief, the hint of "this may be the last time" and I hated it", Naoki's eyes were clouded from memories, suppressed memories, memories that hurt, memories that were bitter, memories that were sweet. "I grew up, surrounded by doctors, teachers and army men, being near other children save for my siblings wasn't something I could do freely, so I only knew my family. I was ridiculed for not being as strong nor healthy as the others, it never went physical, which made it even harder to be stopped", several pairs of hands were curled into fists and teeth were bared, Trajan left out a low growl of anger. Naoki chuckled at the dark memories, not feeling bitter nor sad over them, and why would he, he knew the reason behind it all. "Pain makes you do a lot of things doesn't it? It makes you into a person you didn't know you could become, a bully, a murderer, a teacher, a soldier, and often the cycle of hatred goes on without being cut off. So when I realised this, I decided to let it end on myself, I decided not to breathe hatred. For hatred is the true evil in every single world that exists", he finally looked at them in the eye, his phone secretly been in a call all along, those who were in the call listening to him closely. "I forgave them, but I didn't forget. Would I forget, I'd allow it to be repeated. But also...", he looked towards the trees that were in bloom smiling a bit sadly to himself, "I am scared of allowing you to meet me who isn't in this world. Because in this world, I was able to go on and grow as someone who didn't carry the chains I'd carried in my other childhood since birth. And the thought of meeting you in IRL is... Terrifying".

Naoki grew silent again, closing his eyes, god, he was so so tired. He could just fall asleep on the grass and sleep. That was the price of him letting it all out, this was the price of his insomnia. In the other end of the call, few sniffles were heard.

Baku looked at Seth, who'd also been listening to her second boss, her face grim and eyes filled with emotion. "He really is the protagonist isn't he", she chuckled sadly, "It's his biggest flaw while being his best attribute". Baku closed his eyes thinking to himself, how it all made sense and inside of his chest he felt a sting for having thought badly of his fellow Don in the past.

Tetsuya leaned back in his chair, surrounded by his own set and few Varia officers. Naoki had surprised him once again. He'd learnt while playing that many people would use sad back stories to get pity from those who were around them, but not Naoki. Naoki had another reason. He wanted to explain his behaviour and teach his people, help them see that unnecessary anger wasn't good for anyone, that sooner or later it'd swallow them as a whole. Squalo looked between the body double of his boss and the said actual boss. "Voi! He's not all bad", Xanxus closed his carmine red eyes, silently agreeing. They may not understand fully what the Paravento met by the words like IRL (they're acronyms you dinguses), but it was clear that the guy had some point to be sent through.

Suri choked back another sniffle, being the eldest of the Don Circle, and the only openly woman, had shown her a lot of different things. But it hadn't prepared her for something as heavy as this. Sure, it wasn't phrased heavily, not at all, there were a lot of things that were phrased into a form that was easier to others to listen to. But this was all traumatic information, some of the deepest things that a person could say to another, and Naoki had trusted them with this information, he'd bared his throat to them. Suri wanted to run all the way to Sicily and envelope the cloudy sky into a hug, wanted to tell him that it'd be okay. But at the same time, she knew that it was already okay. He'd opened up. He was ready to let it be in the past, and that's why he'd brought it up. He was moving on. And he didn't want pity, he wanted understanding.

Valentino's eyes were misty from tears, Naoki's story hitting home for him. Without intention, his hand slipped to take a hold of the person's next to him. As Valentino kept crying silently, the large hand of Matteo kept petting his hair lovingly like a mother would. Kyoya glanced down at the hand that was squeezing his, his steel grey eyes softening as he silently squeezed back. It was going to be okay.

Valentino eventually dried his tears before he swallowed the lump that'd sneakily formed into his throat. With a dry throat and fragile voice, he spoke words he didn't think he'd ever say to anyone in any context.

"Guess, we've been brothers in arms longer than I imagined, Nao"

Naoki heard the tiny sounds that were coming from his phone and smiled, it felt good to finally come clean of it all. It felt good to explain why he didn't want to be apart from this world.

This world, was the one where he was finally free from his chains. This world was the one that didn't look down on him based on his past inabilities. This world, was a chance.

As he looked back at the sky, a pigeon flew over him, dropping an envelope it'd been carrying on its peak. Seeing the crest on it, Naoki sighed and ended the call. Looks like Timoteo finally made up his mind of what he'd wanted from Paravento. He glanced over his shoulder, towards his cloud. "How fast can you get Legend27 under your thumb?", he asked instantly sparking a reaction from Cecilia, who smirked.  
"Twelve hours", "Make it fourteen, you need to rest too", "Spoilsport".

Naoki then got up from the grass, smiling widely as he did.

This was going to be a good campaign.

"Call your Division Captains and give them their orders. Mist, I want you to leak out that we're looking for new talents, that should give us some traffic. Sun, check on the hacker team, think you can get that special application on the running projects? Lightning, train the troops, your style has proven to be the best one for growing stamina. Storm, you're with Lightning, you take care of accuracy training, give them hell. Cloud, can you screen the newbies for us? You can let one rat in if you feel like it, I believe that our enemies could be fed some false information that way. And Rain...", Naoki glanced at his right hand woman, Xia He, "Walk with me. We need to be ready to move out in a fortnight. You're dismissed!"  
The group Sprung into action, each of them getting ready to fulfil their order, the sense of dread now gone from the air. Naoki took his second phone that had purple and indigo decorations on its skin. He sent one final command before he turned around and started to walk towards the building they all called jokingly "Winter Palace".

There was a lot to be done. 


	13. Inability

Xia He wasn't completely sure of why her Don had asked her to walk with him. Nor was she fully recovered from the huge amount of New information she'd just received from the said man. She felt angry for the fate that had been bestowed upon him, she felt sad for knowing how much he'd gone through, she felt amazed by seeing how much one of the kindest hearts she'd met had suffered in the past and yet stayed kind. She felt guilty for not knowing earlier.

The two walked down to the dungeon level, passing through the old prison cells that had been turned into private training rooms, cells that had been made into normal rooms and the actual prison cell floor. It was all to quiet. It wasn't sure what the Don was planning, not even his thoughts were known by the rest, though they could always guess. Naoki made a turn to his right, his hand glowing with a thin layer of flames that he used to unlock hidden door in the back of the hall.

Behind the door was a classy looking apartment, styled after the Arthurian legends up to the point of having only round tables everywhere, tapestries of knights and daring swords fights and in middle of it all sat an englishman drinking tea from a large cup. "Gallahad", Naoki said as a greeting, being greeted by the man in return. The Don sat down and tea was poured into two more cups, red Ceylon from the looks of it. "What brings thee here, heavenly shield?" Naoki snorted at the attempt of Shakespearean English and the ridiculous nickname his underling was now using of him. "I used the flame projected shield only once Gallahad, and I am sure that it's nothing compared to yours", he stated as he dropped slice of lemon into his tea. There was a certain script that had to be followed when communicating with the man in question, properly following the "rite" known as teatime (Gallahad's words, not mine) was one of them.

The English teatime wasn't really that big of a deal, sure there were certain things to be done and etiquette to be followed, but it was nowhere near to the level of Asian ones. Naoki chose a sandwich carefully from the tray, making sure to not choose ham. His virtual body could technically digest it, but he didn't want to take any chances. He bit into his prey like a lion to a carcass, still somewhat gracefully. Gallahad's eyes followed his movements, judging everything he did.  
So far, so good.  
More tea was served, now it was the time for the cake, Naoki's face turned blank. He didn't really like cake, most of them were too sweet for his tastes, but he needed to be polite to the point of nearly being impolite. All because of Gallahad having a certain image of how this had to play out.

Finally, the dreadful part was over and Naoki thanked heavens for having very strict grandmother who'd made sure to have the etiquette fixed into the man's brain from the early age.

Business time.

"Gallahad. A new letter arrived earlier today and I need you to take a wing. Go to China and find out what the Triads are doing. I believe that your abilities are needed", Gallahad perked from his seat, his yellow eyes moving to look at the huge shield that was leaning on the wall, dusty from not being used. "Yes.. My King", Naoki bit his tongue, wanting to tell the extreme roleplayer not to use the nick name when referring to him. He was no King nor did he kneel to one, but decided not to say it out loud.   
Gallahad had an ideal he held, Naoki needed to play along to prevent the illusion from shattering.

They'd spent around an hour or two in the hidden room before they'd returned to the higher levels. Upon reaching the ground level of the huge castle like building, Naoki was contacted by Valentino, who'd been also contacted recently by their contract holders. The talk soon went from business to the regular and their next Cake Saturday was marked in the calendar all the while Xia He kept observing her friend in slight worry.  
"Hey Nao?" she said carefully, "From your speech... How much of it was true?" Naoki came to halt. He looked at his right hand woman with grief struck eyes, fully understanding how and why she was asking this question. "I despise lies and try my best not to lie to anyone if I can avoid it. How much of my story was true? 100%. The real question here is... How much I left out, and the answer is a lot. Not because I don't trust you and the others, it's the opposite, I love you too much to give you the full detail of what went down and how much I was affected. But I've also forgotten a lot", Xia He nodded to herself, she'd noticed this about Naoki a long while ago. "In several countries, I'd be thought to be autistic based on how I am naturally, introvertism isn't very common in those countries and my behaviour wouldn't be viewed as normal. Oh! I also can't lie. Or well... I have to eventually expose myself and my lie in one way or another, otherwise I'll feel horrible and disgusted in myself, half truths and withholding information I'm alright with, sometimes you have to do it for the sake of others and sometimes... People won't believe you even if you did tell them the truth because of how bent up they are with their own thoughts and ideologies".

The two walked forward in silence, the white walls of the "winter Palace" echoing with their footsteps.

"Xia He... I want you to assemble a team, a response team, that we can send out whenever there is trouble in the town. There has been spotted some deviant activities there and its possible that they may stir up some trouble", the Chinese assassin's eyes widened before the look of acceptance settled onto her fair face. "Independent one, like the Varia?", "If you so desire, you'll be the Head of it, Just like how Efa is in command of our version of CEDEF".

What was the layout of Paravento exactly? Nobody was completely sure of it. There were companies and cross companies, sister locations, daughter companies special units, secret units, independent factions, and all of them answered to their own respective leaders who in turn answered to the Six who in turn answered to the Seventh.   
The Web was so finely knitted, so masterfully crafted, some parts seemed to be their own little Famiglia.

"How about your siblings?" Xia He suddenly asked, intrigued of what had gone down with them. Naoki's indifferent and almost aloof personality made it hard to distinguish whether or not he had good ties with his family. To the outsiders that was, the Guardians knew better. Naoki simply loved them too much to ever put them in the danger's way, no matter which world it was. He was a family man through and through and sometimes he'd seen sending messages to them to check up on them, albeit it was scarce and rare. But that's what having no sense of time caused. He took life as it was presented to him, living it day by day, eyes fixed on the future, always predicting movements and happenings. "Ciel, Argento and Fiore are walking their own paths, loosely tied to Paravento. My brothers chose to be hitmen despite of the strong sky attributes and are rather good at it. Fiore however.. Fiore is now the leader of a tiny sub famiglia called Terranova within our ranks. Fiore herself isn't as interested in the mafia, so her storm is more or less the one leading it, one of our informants is her mist", ah, there it was, Naoki's keen habit of giving people nicknames based on their personalities. The nicknames of his three younger siblings meaning Sky, Silver and Flower respectively. Hattori Nagisa, Alban Duncan and Helios Alanis, misty sky, sky-lightning and a nowadays half active sunny sky. Naoki had soon enough switched into using nicknames of them to make sure that his relation to the trio was left uncovered, he was known to give others nicknames and use them for the most part, he only used first names and full names when and if he was serious. It was a handy system and made it easier to know when things weren't going as well as they could. For orders he preferred to use the flame names.

"I recently looked into the flame database, especially ours", Naoki suddenly changed the topic, it was something that he sometimes did, he had a huge knowledge of the flame system and how they worked his true genius showing when he did speak of things like that. Naoki was the type that was drawn to the things like metamorphism, psychology and philosophy, his mind was more capable of understanding complex concepts with ease like robotics, AIs and human mind, he was less prone to understanding simple concepts like math equations.  
Xia He hummed at him, encouraging him to continue.   
"It appears that instead of keeping it at three sets, Sky, Ocean and Earth, the developers made up a fourth set. Each of these have something that they rebel when it comes to physics. Sky rebels the time, Earth rebels the place and Ocean is a hybrid that rebels time and place by moving fourth dimensionally to the parallel worlds, supporting the string theory in its own way", Naoki said with as matter of factly tone, and Xia He couldn't really argue with it. "How about the fourth set? I mean, it's obvious that the Sky and Earth exist in order to balance each other out, it's already suggested in their names", she asked, intrigued of what could be going down. "Fire set (A what now?) rebels Time and Place just like Ocean set does, balancing it out, though I believe that it's more or less Time-Space that's being rebelled in their cases, but this game is supposed to be understandable for those who don't have the basic knowledge of the rocket science and high level physics, hence the word space was replaced with place", okay that made....sense? Maybe? To be honest I'm just as lost as the person reading this.

Xia He's brow furrowed, what does that mean in practise? How did that correlate with Paravento? There were so many questions to be answered, yet so little time. "I have a hypothesis that the Flame set, that's us, will be able to send a flame based forecast or sort of to other people, use that to communicate with one another. Kinda like how Vongola rings are capable of storing the memory of the holder to appear for the later dons, the True Inheritance if I may say, but there's nothing to support the hypothesis. Unless the flame reflection slash forecast is the locked talent that none of us will be able to use before the level 150", the Don said, effectively bringing the theme of the conversation to an end. Of course this didn't mean that there wouldn't be conversations about the subject later on, just that this time around there wasn't more to expand on the subject.

"Naoki, I need to ask you something", "Ask away", "Are you autistic? You do have certain things that'd point to that direction-"

Naoki came to halt, confusion and surprise written all over his face, you could almost hear the tiny gears that were going inside his head. Finally, he chuckled, letting the woman on his right to ease, no she didn't offend him by accident.  
"No, I am not", he said notably amused by the situation, "Though I guess that I do have some habits that may point to that direction, but I assure you that I am not on the spectrum". Xia He looked at raven openly confused, she didn't really expect this to happen. "Every country has its own way of declaring that a person is on the spectrum of autism, many seem to state that it's tied to how outgoing and social someone is, but I must beg to differ on that part. In the world, there is an equal amount of extroverts and introverts, so stating that introversion is a sign of autism would make half of the population to be autistic and that, is bloody stupid thing to do", he stated as he continued to walk down the hallway of white marble. Xia He fell into the step with ease, this was how it had been for a long time, Don walking forward, his right hand man falling into the step next to him, bond of trust and honesty lingering between.

"Xia, I want you to do something else before you gather the assassination squad", "Anything, Nao"

Naoki looked at the walls that were covered with tapestries he'd gathered and had had made, there were as of this moment ten scenery tapestries, fifteen made based on old stories and eight were still coming up. "Contact Talbot and inform him of our set needing it's own set of jewellery to be used to concentrate the flames, we need to test different components with him to find the ideal match, eight pieces in total", Xia He nodded, it made sense to do this especially with the knowledge of the fourth flame set existing. None of them had actually been able to use the other flame devices without complications, and it made sense why. The Bovino had made their current weapons, they'd been confused by the flames practically destroying the prototypes that'd been made based on the usual sky flame friendly ingredients.

Xia He bowed making Naoki scoff and remind her that they were equals and she shouldn't bow down to him. The woman only smiled mischievously before she'd run to fulfil her own secret mission. Naoki stood in the empty hall until the echo of her steps faded. "I believe that I don't need to repeat what I just said. Seth?"

A piece of living darkness stepped out of the tapestry that showcased the classic story of Beauty and the Beast in dark and rich colours. It landed on the floor and got rid of its disguise of the hidden enchantress, revealing the chaotic mist, who was now supporting a wide grin on her face. It was as if she'd just been gifted the whole world on a silver platter and she'd exchanged it into an unlimited supply of cake. Oh and she'd also been gifted a zoo with as exotic animals as unicorns and such. Some of the expansion packs made no sense whatsoever. "You really are taking this game seriously aren't you", Seth was the type of person who'd just jump into things for the sake of it, she'd literally filled the mansion with puppies at one point just because she felt like it, it had taken them months to find homes to most of them and even then there were eight remaining on the property. Naoki had taken the liberty of training half of them to be watchdogs while the other half was more or less therapy dogs that actively seemed out the people who weren't feeling well. It had actually helped Cecilia and Nyx a lot during the past couple days along with Maya, who was often seen playing with them. "Your order is clear isn't it? Are you going to use the mist corridors to move around again or will you ask Baku to allow you to go out on a mission?" the raven asked earning a huff from the mist as her attempt to rile the sky failed. "Baku gave me a mission that's on the same area as the one you gave to me, so that won't be a problem. Say, Nao, when will you ask him out?" Naoki blinked.   
"Pardon?" he asked not sure of where the conversation was going. "Oh jeez, you know what I mean, that guy, the one with insufferable grin and who keeps phasing back and forth when you're not around", Seth said feeling slightly frustrated while her second boss started to change colour.

"I don't know what you're talking about Seth", an obvious cover up is obvious, but it won't hide the red ears. Seth smirked devilishly, her Mammon-like appearance shifting a little as she did so. Oh how delightful the reaction of her prey was. "Don't give me that Nao, everyone and their mother know that something's up between the two of you! The news are all around the place, speculating if you and S-", a hand was pressed on her mouth to end the sentence before it made it to the end, the owner of the said hand being glowing red from being flustered, like a blood moon.  
.....or a tomato.   
"Seth, please.. I'm not, I- I just can't okay? I don't want to ruin things between him and I, and he probably doesn't share the feeling. I am his boss, I am his friend, becoming his l-lo-lov- significant other. Would be in excusable, at worst he'd receive bad looks, he might even become a target. Not to mention that people might think that I used my position to make it happen. I can't bear that thought Seth, I like him too much to have anything bad to happen to him", Naoki babbled away feeling tiny sense of panic surface. Seth stared at him for a while, her eyes hidden in the shadow cast by the hood.

She started to cackle.

"I can't believe this! Naoki, you really can't say words "love" and "lover"? What kind of an inability is that even?" the mist howled in laughter while her boss felt the sudden urge to fall through the ground and become one with lava. He looked away in embarrassment. "Seth... I haven't really.. Been in romantic relationships, the thought makes me nervous. And I grew up in an environment where those words weren't said lightly, saying that you love someone is.. It's a commitment, it's serious, it's about intimacy. By saying those words, I'd be allowing the subject of my admiration to step inside my private life, inside my mind, and know everything there is to know about me and it... It frightens me. That's why I don't say those words lightly"

Seth stopped laughing, her face now the textbook definition of shock.

"Oh my god..."


	14. Falling Sand

Seth wasn't in the best mood imaginable, why? Well. She just wasted two hours on trying to get her boss and friend to ask their crush out without avail and while it was rewarding to see the man squirm in embarrassment. It was quite adorable if you asked from her, it was a pity that Naoki was most often in middle of solving other people's problems and couldn't kick back to relax. He was often exhausted, stressed, compressed into the work state which he showed to most.  
There was a theory to which the man often referenced to, something about each person having three faces, one for the world, one for closest people and one for self. It was an odd thing to talk about, but it explained a lot about the man and how he'd grown up.

Seth sighed again, brushing few strands of stray hair behind her ear, it was all just so complicated and annoying. But the complications never came from the situation, but the people within it. She'd tried to coax them to confess to another. But none of the five couples would do this, none of them had taken a step forward, stubbornly hiding behind blushing cheeks and averted eyes. The ladies blushing and hiding, dreamily sighing, the men looking into the other direction, too caught up in being embarrassed over having feelings. It was such a stupid thing.  
It was a good thing that she wasn't anything like that. Oh no, she was rational gremlin. No man nor woman could ever-  
Seth felt one of those impulses again, she wasn't what they meant, but it couldn't be good. Most of them had thought that the error had been already taken care of, but Seth knew better, she had an inside man in the game company. And that inside man had told her that nothing could be done to the glitch, it was as if it was alive.  
The mist bit her lower lip out of nervous habit, she didn't know what to do. Could she actually do anything.  
As the woman walked forward, only accompanied by the long shadows of decaying dreams a single figure of pure white joined her. They didn't need to acknowledge one another, they knew each other all too well. They had no time to waste, they were on a mission. And so the harbinger of chaos and the shield of people moved out, their silent footsteps louder than any sound.

While his half Mist and her partner in crime left the grounds of Paravento, exiting through the Winter Palace, the Don himself was having a delightful morning out. He was having his usual coffee with Valentino, the two of them talking and laughing. Every now and then they'd comment on the proposal of the Godfather himself. But as of this moment they were more interested in the fact that Valentino had finally completed his own set.  
"It was insane Nao! I didn't expect it at all!" Naoki hummed his answer as he sipped his cioccolato cappuccino. He'd soon enough learnt to follow the day routine of the Italians as they were very strict about when certain coffee could be consumed. Cappuccinos and al latte were morning drinks, espresso the after morning. "Matteo, Kyoya, Kujaku and I were in a pinch, surrounded by these goons, when BAM! a guy wearing a cape dropped on them with two others and took care of them" the young Primo was ecstatic about the fact as he'd spent a long while trying to find his missing set. "The rain is a bubbly one, her name is Sam, the storm is bit insecure and goes by the name Amato and then there's the mist, the only player of that group his name is Daniel", the blonde said before taking a long sip from his own latte. The waitress in duty laid down their orders and smiled at Naoki before she left to do her duties. Valentino gave a pointed look at her direction.  
"She left a phone number, Nao", he said as he pulled out the tiny slip of paper from its place next to Naoki's plate. Naoki eyed it with disinterest. "She's not my type, too much flirt and too little wit", he eventually said causing his friend to nearly drown on his drink. For a tiny moment the two engaged into a talk about their ideal partners.

Seth looked around in the dark room, her senses screaming her to run as fast as she could, but she ignored it in favour of examining the piece of equipment in front of her. Why it was there and what it did, she didn't know. But it couldn't be good.

"Would I not view you as a brother", the raven said suddenly, "I'd probably ask you out on a date". Valentino shrugged this off, knowing fully well what Naoki meant when he said things like that. He wasn't well reversed in complimenting others and preferred to rather talk about personalities than looks. "I'm flattered Nao, good to know that you find me to have more than one brain cell and tolerable personality", the blonde grinned to his friend.

The device resembled that of a computer, with its wide and flat screen, though that specific type of computer wouldn't exist for another ten years in-game. There was a picture of an hourglass, typical loading screen graphics from the older games, but something was off with it.

"If I didn't find you to be interesting, I wouldn't have bothered to talk with you at all", the raven retorted making his blonde friend think back to how he'd behaved near certain people in the past. He'd been very polite with Theo, but there was always sense of aloofness within his person. To Kujaku he was kinder and more relaxed by his speech. So... He'd known beforehand that something was off.

Seth walked closer to the station, her ears picking up the sounds of a shield hitting something. She'd spent a good ten minutes explaining to Galahad why she needed him to use the shield unorthodoxically today, and it seemed like it worked. She squinted her eyes, the screen in front of her was too bright against the darkness of the room. She redd the text.

"I can believe it though, it's just way too funny coincidence! You're more into the sunny personalities while I find the ones that are more or less clouded to be more appealing", Valentino laughed earning a sincere smile and a chuckle from Naoki. Gone were the haunted looks in their eyes, bright was the way how they viewed future. Yes, it was perfect.  
"It tells a lot about us as people though, and it does explain where the flame system was partially based on", Paravento Primo said while Valentino nodded in agreement. They had spent hours upon hours trying to figure out why their secondaries were as they were, now it made sense. Naoki was selectively outgoing personality, more prompt to feeling melancholy despite of him stubbornly forcing himself to stay positive and hopeful.  
Valentino was more social, and had a way with people though he, too, easily went to the darker path of thoughts.

Seth's eyes widened as she realised what was the purpose of the computer. And it wasn't good at all. They needed to get out of the base immediately. She slipped both of her flames out to Galahad, something they'd agreed to use as an alarm incase something went wrong.

Naoki stopped for a second, his face serious as a grave, Valentino put his cup down. He'd seen this behaviour before. The moment when his best friend had that aura as if he wasn't there with him. His ability to know that something isn't going as it should be, the hyper intuition. "Naoki", he stated, knowing that the male needed to be given the permission to leave the table if it came to it, and saying his name did the trick. The aloof look on his face passed, his body relaxing ever so slightly. "It was resolved"

Seth gasped for air, they'd barely made it out in time before the base fell. Mist corridors truly were handy things. They were now back at the Winter Palace, both laying on the floor sweaty from fear and the amount of running they'd just done. "Galahad", she said with a raspy voice, "Go make me a sandwich and tea".

Valentino pat Naoki's arm and winked another waitress to their table, ordering two lattes. "My friend needs a pick me up, he just got a word from his family, his grandmother passed away this morning", he lied to the woman who glanced at the other Don, "Keep that other waitress away from him while at it, darling, I don't want her to bother my friend when he's not well. I'll tip you well".  
The drink were brought hurriedly to them and the two dug in.  
While they were at this, a series of memories were downloaded to their persons causing them to comically spit out whatever they had in their mouths. A moment of silence passed between them as. They stared at one another with wide eyes.

" _You crashed into a WALL_?!"  
" _Your box weapon is PONYTA_?!"

In the Paravento HQ, same thing was happening resulting with series of laughters, groaning and forcing others to take oaths to never bring up the incident number 806 whatever that was. Oh and while they were at it, Nyx went ahead and sealed one entrance with scandalised look on their face.

After cackling to herself for a while, Seth finally got up from the floor, deciding to write her report. The faster she'd do it, the faster she'd get rid of it and the faster she'd be paid. She didn't like the rules that Naoki enforced on her, but she still followed them, because she knew that the sky in question also followed them, it was just fair.

With the dons finally calming down (and promptly apologising their sudden burst), they started to think about what it all meant. They hadn't even realised that the future arc was taking place already, none of them had gotten the notice from the game to switch into playing in the future Mode. Which was ultimately odd considering that they were supposed to be able to do so. Another glitch maybe?

Seth cursed mentally the whole situation. It all made suddenly sense, the glitching, the impulses, the weird changes within the game, everything. And this wasn't done by Byakuran or anyone else, oh no, this was something that had been carefully crafted by the NPCs in the Triad section. Something had prompted them to do this, something had gone wrong in their game code, and now it was too late to change it.  
The mist marched over to the mother figure of the Paravento, she needed to do something about the inevitable. If she couldn't stop it, she might as well make sure that someone knows what the hell was going on.

"Natalia", she said to the woman, who immediately turned her attention on her from the recruit field where Trajan and Maya were currently dividing the accepted recruits into teams. "Yes, Koei?" Natalia's nickname for her was odd and had taken some time to get used to. Koei was a play on the words Koe and Koi, both of them having two meanings if you looked at either Finnish or Japanese. Koe, voice in Japanese, test or exam in Finnish while Koi meant love (JAP), a moth (FI) and was also a type of fish. What Natalia exactly was calling her, the voice of love , voice of moth, test of love or test of moth, nobody knew but her.  
"There's something weird going on, something that'll shake the balance of the two worlds, and it can't be stopped. However, I want to make sure that someone can remember the things as they were", Seth said ignoring the sense of dread and pain, the tiny lump that was threatening to make its way into her throat. Natalia's eyes widened before turning hard as she accepted what was to come. She watched how the younger woman created a tiny orb in her hands, which glew in the colours of a rainbow, instantly recognising it as raw data and memories that the mist had of her friends there.  
The elderly woman bowed ever so slightly and closed her eyes when Seth started to bring the creation towards her head. The sensation of something entering her mind was odd and little uncomfortable, but the housekeeper had faith in her ward.  
The memories of the two worlds along with the knowledge they contained flooded into her mind. It was fascinating to see that the other world appeared to be ahead of its time on the electronic field while the people were more or less the same. However, seeing the same insecurities and injustices plague the people of the other world felt like a stab in her heart. Yet she knew, as long as the man race existed, there's be injustice and pain. It was inherent thing within the genetic code of humanity.  
As the final memory was in its place, Natalia opened her eyes, blinking couple times. She looked at Seth, her eyes filled with fear and wonder.

"They're set to fuse?", "I don't know"

Naoki and Valentino finally parted ways, both going to the cars they'd called earlier to pick them up. The two drivers greeted one another, both of them being used to seeing one another on Saturdays. After all, their bosses never failed to have their meeting and thus the drivers were often seen together as the result of that. As the two cars turned, soon taking their routes towards the two destinations, Naoki couldn't help but to feel restless for some reason.  
It was one of those feelings when you felt like you forgot something important, we're supposed to go somewhere, but you don't know where. Except that this time there really wasn't anything to go to, no meetings to hold, no deadlines for assignments, nothing. It was like anxiety attack, but more like the ground beneath your feet was burning, telling you to leave the place soon. He pulled up the options and settings, scanning through it, only to find that the logout button was missing.  
"Well then...", he mused silently, "this is a fine pickle we've gotten ourselves into". Realising that there was nothing to he done, the Don crossed his legs and leaned into his hand, looking out of the window as the streets passed him, wondering idly, how many had noticed this. Remembering that he had family outside the game, he sat up straight, with the look of horror in his eyes, what would happen to them? How would they react to the situation? His grandmother will surely throw a fit. He took out his phone and messaged his mother, hoping that they'd soon see the message, also dreading that he had to inform them of something like this. He didn't want to be a burden to them, they were busy, they had gone through enough because of him, they were busy.

The car finally stopped and the male got up, now completely calm and seemingly over what he'd found out. He had no time to wallow in self pity nor fear, he needed to keep everyone focused, be the rock base to stand on. He opened the doors into the chaos, walking gracefully like a cat, allowing himself to radiate with harmony, efficiently calming down everyone.  
He walked up the stairs to the platform where it divided into two, opening his arms, feeling like the mockery of the statue of Jesus.  
"Everyone, please calm down", he said without raising his voice, doing that would only feed the panic. "Take out your options menu and report the problem to the Fiamma and they will do their best to correct this. Stay calm and go about your day like you usually would in here. Those who have family, notify them through the phones, there is a system you can use as long as you remember their IRL phone numbers, do not engage in duels nor fights just in case until this has been sorted out, do you understand?"  
The hallway echoed from the answers of the players present, each of them doing as they were told. Naoki glanced at Natalia and left out a sigh of defeat. " Natalia, inform the chef that tonight, exceptionally, there will be hundred at the dinner", he said as he turned to the left, towards the rooms of the Officers and himself.

As the man walked, tears of fear, stress and agony blurred his vision, but he refused to cry, he couldn't cry yet. He was still out in the public, he could still be seen. He passed door to the office section, no, they weren't private enough, and kept walking forward. Few tears managed to break through and were now falling down his cheeks like the traitors they were. He passed the living room section of the Seven (or Eight if you counted Seth), seen by his Guardians, who immediately got up, eyes widened in shock and disbelief.  
Because Naoki rarely cried.

Efa dashed to him, but Naoki couldn't bare to even look into his direction yet, he wanted to ask them not to look at him, but he'd lost his ability to speak. It wasn't until he reached the door to the living quarters that he finally broke down, unable to move forward anymore. His legs giving in as he fell onto the floor, hugging himself in his sorrow, feeling the cold sweep into his very being. He hated crying, but he understood the importance of it. "Close...door...", he croaked with his dry throat, "please". Cecilia got up slowly, her eyes still in the man as she did as he requested before creeping towards him. Efa looked at the older man in worry, but he didn't dare to touch him. So he kneeled instead, each of his fellow Guardians coming close, yet giving space to the crying man.

Naoki was a private person, he'd rather keep his emotions hidden neath a well crafted mask, just like he'd done with his private life. Now that mask was cracking.  
The raven shook from the cold, not thinking rationally anymore. By instinct, he leaned closer like a child or a cat, looking for warmth, his shaking body finding it from Efa, who closed his arms carefully. Sniffling and gasping for air slowly ceased, turning into even breathing, Primo had fallen asleep. Efa wanted to move him, but he didn't dare to do so, not when the raven looked so fragile, head resting against his shoulder and a delicate hand still holding onto the fabric of his shirt. The others closed in, looks were exchanged, but nothing was said, there was no need.

This had been Naoki's breaking point.

He'd been gathering stress, never guite letting go of it, his private life, assignments, drama within the game, he'd carried it all with him. And now that he was trapped into the game that had been his freedom, he'd broken down. And who were they to blame him? Seth bit her lower lip in growing anger, fully knowing what caused them to be trapped.  
She swore silently that she'd take down the foolish group within the Triads and make them pay, for nobody made her friends cry. Anger truly wasn't a good colour on her.

In another base located in Japan, a computer went off, slowly calculating the time for the end of the World as they knew it.


	15. Endings and Beginnings

It has been a week since the logout option disappeared without a trace. During this week, those who were trapped within the game along with the health experts learnt that somehow their bodies didn't grow fragile nor perish without nutrition within the reality as long as they did eat and exercise within the game. The ability of sending messages and talk between the reality and the game making it easier for scientists to examine this phenomenon.

Month in, most schools had started to send the school work into the game so the students who were trapped could still go forward with their educations, some even graduating while inside the game, their speeches being streamed in the schools, with special NPCs handing out the data copies of their papers.

Natael was one of these people, the young man standing up in his office, surrounded by his closest friends, wine glasses in their hands.

He'd given his speech previously and a representative from the University (an NPC by the name Toivo) had handed him his papers, which he hadn't even glanced at. He knew all too well what it'd say. So he'd just put it into his inventory and turned his attention on the others. The stream had already ended so now it was just him and his friends. He looked at them, properly looked at them, still saddened by his inability to see his family physically yet.  
They'd been given the word that the company was working on the problem, but it'd take a time. The game was based on an advanced self-learning AI which made it very delicate and hard to tap into. The positive outlook was that they'd be free in six months, more realistic point stated nine. And the pessimist? Never.

They'd learnt a lot about one another during the past months, tiny habits, personal needs, views. Likes and dislikes.

And surprisingly enough, Naoki had opened up a lot more about his private life, openly longing to log out, his full personality shining through the character they'd learnt him to be. It wasn't really that Naoki and Natael were separate people, they were the same person, but from shifted perspective. Natael being more accustomed into completing the tasks that asked for heavy logic, socialising and so forth, Naoki was the innovative and creative side. As a full on personality though? It was clear that the Primo of the Paravento Famiglia longed for freedom and preferred more bohemian lifestyle. He got fidgety often, and being around people for too long made him almost claustrophobic. He was also an excellent speaker, he just hated to be put into the spot and be in the middle of the attention. He'd also have times when he was more aloof, preferring to be in solitude when that happened.  
Sadly, not many of those who were around him could comprehend this idea.

Few more days passed and the Don was once again supporting his disguise, ultimately running into a woman with blue tinted hair. The second he'd laid eyes on her, Naoki felt uncomfortable and that he needed to get away from the young female. He didn't manage to do this, sadly, as the woman had immediately zoned into him.

Naoki blinked several times as she spoke to him in a very broken Japanese and he cringed internally. She was telling her name to be Kanna and that she liked how he looked. A lot. She stated that it made her think about Reborn and Naoki cringed more.  
He really didn't know how to react to this situation, was he being flirted with? Why was this woman so keen on clinging to him? Who was she?  
"Please stop, you're making me uncomfortable", he grunted in Japanese as an answer, silently thanking Valentino for teaching him to speak it more fluently, but the woman wouldn't stop. She was in middle of declaring her love for him as of that moment, making the poor man even more uncomfortable.

After a while, the girl switched to English, thank heavens, starting to ask more private questions from Naoki, who tried his best to dodge them, his eyes darting to different directions in hopes of finding a way out.

A hand was swung around his shoulder. "Toshirooo! Sorry that I'm late~! You didn't have to wait for too long did you?" praised be the Lord, Valentino came to the rescue. The blonde looked at Kanna his eyes narrowing ever so slightly. "Miss, can't you see that you're making him feel uncomfortable? Besides, Toshiro is taken, he has a girlfriend already", Naoki blinked before deciding to play along, leaving out a tiny sound of affirmation. The girl stopped on her tracks, an ugly look passing her face. Something between anger, rage and humiliation. "Why didn't he say anything?!" she asked her voice turning into a high-pitched one. Valentino gave her a crooked smile while poking his friend's cheek. "It's not part of his culture miss, and he didn't want you to lose your face. You know how stuck on the sense of honour Japanese are, also it's possible that he didn't understand what you were saying to him, your pronunciation from time to time was very confusing".  
Naoki shot a thankful look to Valentino. "Yes, I wasn't exactly sure what was going on", he said with a faked heavy Engrish, the faster the girl would go away, the better. "What is her name?", "E?", "His girlfriend's name"  
The duo sweated heavily as they tried to come up with a good fake name for the nonexistent girlfriend. "Akari", Naoki blurted out as he thought about his crush, blushing ever so slightly, "Hinamori Akari". Kanna squinted her eyes before grumbling under her breath, leaving the scene ultimately. Valentino took one look at his shaking friend and decided to drag him into their usual place.

"The nerve of some people", the blonde fumed to himself while the raven opposite of him was still trying to wrap his head around the happenings of the past hour. He was also contemplating on taking few missions and go through them under his previous previous alias as a hitman. He just needed some alone time that's all. He was very much like that one character from Finnish kids show, Moomins, who disappeared every autumn and returned in spring. Snuf-whatever his name was again, was very similar to Naoki personality wise after all.

"Nao? Oy. Nao", Naoki blinked himself back to "reality", soon meeting the concerned eyes of Valentino. "Where'd you go?", "Just thinking..."  
"About what?" Valentino asked curiously wanting to know what was going on inside the raven's head. Naoki shifted on his seat as a plate of lemon cheese cake was laid in front of him. He wasn't really that fond about sweets, nor citrus fruits due to being allergic to them in his childhood, but every now and then he did order a sweet in the Sepostole - café. Today was such day for him, he just needed a little pick me up.  
"Everything, everyone, this whole situation. I... I don't think that we'll ever get out of the game, I feel like... Something will happen? But it's not.. It's not necessarily bad?" ah, the famed intuition of Naoki, the two of them had become somewhat of a legend as they both were like carbon copies of Cavallone Dino and Vongola Primo, some even joking that they should attempt to take over those factions. But they were content with their own famiglias, famiglias that were tightly knit and where they knew that they could trust in one another. "I also looked more into the files with the help of Sun, we found the full extent of the fourth flame", Valentino perked up, they had been exchanging messages of the matter often recently, both of them trying to figure out what was up.  
"What did you find?"

"The flames are more or less corresponsione to the following; Fire to Sky, Coal to Sun, Heat to Rain, Inferno to Storm, Ash to Cloud, Combust to Lightning and Smoke to Mist, we're still testing the extents of these flames, but it seems like it was created to balance out the Mare set", Valentino nodded to himself, it made sense. Too much sense. "And you suggest that different people can have different parts of these sets?" Naoki drew tiny swirls on the table with the coffee that'd spilt over. "Yes, it's the only explanation as to how Seth was capable of harmonising with two Sky types from different factions. I believe that the Mist type is the point where the sets meet, Cloud being potentially the second. It's in their nature", the raven explained to his friend, who was more than used to the occasionally crazy theories of the other male. What made it interesting was the slightly older man's ability to make anything sound believable, the ability to make people follow his lead without any notable efforts. Of course, the man appeared to be oblivious of this ability or at least not view it as something he'd want to actively do. Even avoided if he did know of it.

"Think that either of us will be able to accidentally bond with another sky?"  
Silence fell between them, thoughtful silence, as both of them tried to imagine such thing happening. Of course there was the BETA server, but that was more or less testing for the function itself.  
"I don't think so? Both of us have pretty low purity on the secondary flames. Plus we're Skies so it'd make sense for us to have harmonised internally, no?", "Makes sense"  
They resumed to their silence, both avoiding the memory of the BETA. Yes, they'd had fun, but they'd also felt a little claustrophobic, trapped, within the server as they were held down by responsibilities of their own factions, had someone who told them what to do and when to do it, on the long run it had gotten onto their nerves.

Valentino looked up, willing his aura vision into action. His eyes widened. "Naoki... When you said that something would appear, did it by any chance have to do with a... Ah.. Water like wall that appears to be speeding towards us at a fast speed?" his voice went higher as he spoke, he was obviously afraid of the thing that was visible only to his eyes. Naoki stared at his best friend, his brows furrowed. "It looks like an anomaly within the code, I can make some numbers that are flowing through it, but it's very fast. I can't really see what it does either, the environment is.. Turning white", Valentino observed as he swiftly summoned the interface, frantically tapping the point where the log out button used to be.  
Naoki took a deep breath, trying his best not to get swiped with the growing panic. He didn't feel like he was in danger. If anything he felt like whatever was coming was going to do something good, though there was also that feeling of bitterness. Nothing that was is free of pain and sadness after all.  
Naoki grabbed Valentino's wrist and stared into his wide eyes, radiating calmness. "Valentino. It's okay. That thing you see isn't bad, I know it, but I need you to promise me that we'll meet again. Was it in the next server, irl or next life", the blonde froze. Naoki seemed calm, but his eyes were desperate and full of fear of being alone. He now knew how secluded his life had been as a child, heck the people he played with had probably been his first friends ever. Valentino swallowed his fear and nodded. He took hold of Naoki's hand. "No matter what, I'll find you. I swear this on my life, flames and dying will".  
A smile spread to the raven's lips as he opened his mouth to whisper "Thank you....", before the anomaly hit them.

In their mansions, the elements of the two skies perked up as they first felt the dons fade out of existence. Their grief and fear morphing into dark promise. "Next time. Next time I'll make sure to protect you".

The anomaly swallowed the server as a whole in a matter of minutes, from that one server it moved to another, gaining speed and mass as it did. Through the computer lines and electronic circuits, it kept going forward, first affecting the bodies of the gamers themselves, and as they faded out of existence, cries of pain, fear and confusion were heard. From the VR pods, the anomaly found a way to the other world, the so-called real world. It erupted from the pods as an explosive force, swallowing everything like a forest fire. And the world shattered.

Only for it to reassemble itself, as if fate itself had caught up on the happenings and shook their pointing finger in disapproval before gluing together the ball that its cat had just broken. Cats are assholes, capisce? Of course, while re-assembling things, you sometimes don't get all the details right and might accidentally turn that vase or sphere into a modern art piece only saved by taking it apart and trying again, but fate doesn't tend to do that shit. Nor does life. They both just shrug their shoulders as if they were college students who did a thing half assedly, going "Eh" and then walking away, never thinking about the thing ever again.

Except at 3 am while having an existential crisis. But I mean, that's only every night, so who cares am I right (que nervous laughter from the author)?

The point is that things aren't exactly like they were.

In the whiteness, Natael opened his eyes, blinking couple times in the brightness. He made vague shapes that looked like they could be humans, but they could also be just strategically placed clothes in a hanger. You know, that one that spooks you out when you're sleepy so you throw it into the closet only to open the closet again to apologise from it incase it had become sentient or were worn by a boogeyman. That one.  
From what he could tell, he was floating. But it didn't really feel like that. It felt nothing to be honest. He just made that assumption because he couldn't feel what he was standing on nor the space he was in. But he could sense the people who were around him.  
As he kept looking into different directions, something akin to a rather oddly constructed movie started to play. It seemed to start with an ape. An ape that while falling from a tree. Combusted into flames. White flames. What the actual f-  
He watched with curiosity how the timeline of the events appeared to roll out and as he so did, his mind seemed to turn emptier and blanker all the while his form became smaller and smaller. But the "movie" wasn't done, not yet.  
Every single war that happened, every major event, every crisis. Within them all always stood someone whose forehead was set ablaze by a brilliant white flame. Then, at one point, the variety of flames increased.

One flame, two flames, eight, fifteen, twenty-two, thirty, until it finally stabilised at twenty-nine, the white flame completely disappearing from the face of earth. But those who still remembered realised its significance. Stones of the stonehenge were built to become vessels which would create and artificial white flame, also known as the King Flame. But overtime, there weren't enough who were capable of sustaining it, and the nature of four of the flames known as Cloud, Ash, Glacier and Ghiaccio were too fleeting elements, all of them needing enough space and alone time.  
So they had to come up with something else. A way to recharge the stonehenge from afar. And thus, the Quattuor-sette was created. That wasn't the end of their problems though, after a while, and Fire set was lost in time as no flame user with their primary flames being of that set were born, and even fewer could ever dream to unlock such power within their core. Out of the four original sets, Fire had been the one that had required its users to go through even inhumane amounts of pain, near death and trauma before becoming active. And as the activation of any set was already tricky task, the ancients decided to use the most commonly found set as a replacement. The Sky.  
After many errors, the Arcobaleno pacifiers came to be, each of the pacifiers being customised to draw out the strongest flames within the person, up to the point where their hidden secondaries could also be consumed. Sadly, this came with a heavy price, and thus those who became arcobaleno were met with a terrible fate, dying in infant bodies, believed to have been too weak by their health by the common folk without the knowledge of the flames, grieved and celebrated as heroes by those who knew better.

The movie came to an end, flames were set. Most were without them along with their memories being wiped out or given a new. Families were torn apart and reassembled, men were born as women and vice versa. Some were lost at birth, others never had a chance. Happy families, broken families, horrible parents, good parents, bad parents.  
This was how it came to be when the timeline was reseted. As the two timelines couldn't coexist anymore. So the one that was stronger, the world that had started out as a simulation game, consumed the other one, its people becoming part of it.  
No memories of the game ever existing were left in those who had been from the original world, no knowledge of other worlds remained within the previously NPC characters. All that had once been into a form of entertainment, make belief, came reality. Data became flesh and bones, AIs into real minds handled by real brains. And surrounded by all of it stood a woman and a man, the only ones who had a recollection of the past that never was, what never happened. Both determined to find the figures within their minds and bring them to safety.

A childless mother and a Knight without a King, they moved forward, their memories guiding them.

Into several households ran by the mafia, heirs were born. Allegri, Beaulieu and Suzaku being only few of them. Matteo Rossini, the young Hitman of the Allegri laid his blue eyes on the young heir, feeling unconditional love towards the child that wasn't even his. He looked up to the Don and his wife, the latter being now fragile as a flower on the brink of death, for her son had different blood type than she was. She had been given the necessary medication after giving birth, but there still wasn't guarantee that she'd make it. The Don looked at his son, both glad and concerned. He was already quite old, so the fact that he'd been able to conceive a child with his wife was a miracle. There was no doubt that the boy would be trained to takeover as soon as possible.  
"Matteo, meet my heir, Valentino", Matteo stared into the eyes of his future boss and smiled softly. "Hello there, Secondo-to-be, I'll make sure that nobody will ever hurt you", the baby giggled at the young man, his chubby hand soon founding its way into the mouth of the infant as his eyes turned slowly purple. Matteo nodded to himself, the child was an Allegri indeed.

The household of the Oda family was busy with people, cops were going about despite there not being any emergencies. The reason? Inspector Oda nee Sakurai had just given birth to a small little boy. The chief himself had also taken time to come, to both congratulate the new mother and to meet his nephew (he'd nominated himself as an uncle despite of not being related to the inspector). Miaka Oda somehow managed to look even more terrifying than usual and she wasn't even wearing her uniform. It was probably due to the fact that her coworkers had decided to smoke inside the house, something that the woman in question didn't approve of. The little boy, named Naoki after the deceased friend and partner of Miaka, was fast asleep in his cradle, where his father was cooing to him despite of the child obviously not answering them because hello people the baby is sleeping.

In the household of Tenoh, a new father took one glance at his son, ultimately turning away in disdain. He'd lost his wife because of this pink crying creature? Unacceptable. With a flick of his wrist the head of the Tenoh Corp sent the nurse he'd hired, by the name Natalia Romanoff, away with the pink screaming infant. He didn't fancy having a child, sure he needed a heir, but what had it cost him? Everything that he'd really cared for. So Masao Tenoh hardened his heart, ultimately deciding to only raise the child to be his heir, not his son.

Natalia laid the baby boy, Haruka, into a cradle, she spot the five year old son of the said baby's godfather creeping closer. "Look Jean, this is Haruka, make sure that you look after him and protect him, okay?" she said gently to the boy who shook his head in denial. "No Ha'u", he said pointing to the baby, "She'lia". Natalia was taken back by the boy's exclamation, but smiled nevertheless. Perhaps she wasn't the only one with odd memories after all.  
"Yes Jean, that is Cecilia, but something changed and she's now a boy and as a boy his mother wanted his name to be Haruka", the boy thought for a second before looking back at the infant. He seemed to make a silent vow to himself as he soon nodded and turned around, running out of the door. Natalia thought back to how her memories told that things had been, how they should've been.  
A kind man surrounded by a group of people, their wish to protect others, the tiny glances of the said man towards another man who wore yellow, look of admiration and something more towards the man in yellow, nicknames, promises, tears, laughter, joy, pain. A man with kind eyes, a ring, a silent promise, the name Matteo, the knowledge of multiple worlds. Natalia's hands curled into fists as the sense of loneliness and grief flowed over her.  
But she smiled nonetheless and bowed down to plant a small kiss on Haruka's forehead. "Don't worry Purple Lady, I'll make sure that you all can find each other again", she whispered to the child who immediately stopped crying, look of surprise on his small face.

Yes, Natalia mused to herself, this may not be an end after all, this was just another beginning.  
Now the question remains.

How long will it take for the Famiglia to reunite, and will it once again become the shield between the innocent and those who wish to bring harm to them?


End file.
